[Tlhingan-hol] Type 5 on first noun

[lojmIttI'wI'nuv]

Placing two nouns next to each other does not make them a genitive pair. The absence of other reasons to be together makes them a genitive pair. If they were followed by a conjunction, they would not be a genitive pair. If there was a comma between them or could otherwise be interpreted as apposition, they would not be a genitive pair. If the first noun is a person’s name and the second noun is a military rank and the pair of words identifies the same person, it is not a genitive pair. With a Type 5 suffix on the first noun, you have a reason to assume that they are not a genitive pair.

You are fixated on the idea that despite what is clearly stated in TKD, a genitive pair can have a Type 5 suffix on the first noun, and you have no justification for this idea. It is not the case that we have canon that proves this to be the case. It is the case that we have canon that you are determined to interpret this way, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

If {telDaq wovmoHwI’mey} were a genitive pair, it would mean something like “the lights of the at the wing”, or “the at the wing’s lights”. I fail to see that as a superior translation to the simpler sentence fragment: “At the wings, lights.” It is, after all, a sentence fragment. Nobody is arguing that it is a complete sentence. Generally speaking, sentence fragments can be inserted into sentences without changing the grammatical interpretation of the words.

If you take the genitive pair {HoD taj} “captain’s knife”, and insert it into a sentence, like {HoD taj vIHo’}, “I admire the captain’s knife,” I have not changed the meaning of the genitive pair. 

If I take the sentence fragment {telDaq wovmoHwI’mey} and place it in a sentence {telDaq wovmoHwI’mey vIHo’}, I would not be tempted to interpret it as a genitive pair. “At the wings, I admire the lights.” I would not interpret that to be “I admire the lights of the at the wings,” or “I admire the at the wings’s lights.”

Yes, I can see the way you could call that a genitive relationship between the location and the thing at the location, since the location describes or identifies the noun, but whether you like it or not, we actually DO have the rule that you can’t put the Type 5 on the first noun of a genitive noun-noun construction, and the resulting translation enjoying the benefit of this rule is in no way inferior to your preference to tweak the translation so that it can violate the rule and prove to the Universe the perfection of your personal understanding of how the language really works, despite clear description in TKD to the contrary.

[sigh]

Okay, I’ll step into a parallel Universe where this rule never existed. Everything is exactly the same, except that Okrand never stated the rule, or if he did, he later recanted it, or just left us hints so that we would figure it out on our own.

What do we gain here? How is this better than the Universe we actually live in?

If we could interpret {telDaq wovmoHwI’mey vIHo’} to mean “I admire the lights of the at-the-wing.” We would also be able to interpret it as “At the wing, I admire the lights.”

There would be no syntactic difference to let us know which meaning the sentence had. It would be ambiguous… exactly like it already is.

In both Universes, we could be at the wing, admiring the lights, or we could be on the planet below, looking through a powerful telescope and admiring the lights located on the wing. There is nothing gained in terms of the ability to express meaning. We’d have exactly the same ambiguity that we already have.

So, why bother declaring the rule void? What does it get us? How do we gain by it? How is our understanding of the workings of the language improved? What new forms of expression are we capable of making?

I don’t see any. Could you provide some evidence of improved expressive capacity for the language?

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Feb 10, 2016, at 4:33 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 2/10/2016 3:47 PM, lojmIttI'wI'nuv wrote:
>> Good example.
>> 
>> {wovmoHwI’mey telDaq} would look like a noun-noun construction being
>> used as a locative. “At the wings of the lights” or “At the lights’
>> wings”. That’s not what the poster is trying to convey.
>> 
>> {telDaq wovmoHwI’mey} is not a noun-noun construction. There is no
>> “genitive” relationship between these words. This is a sentence
>> fragment. “At the wings, lights.”
> 
> So none of you can see what a ludicrous thing to put on a diagram this is, given this interpretation? We don't see "on the bridge, the helm," or "on the bottom, the landing gear." So why this item?
> 
> If there were no N1-5 N2 restriction, would "at the wings, lights" still be your understanding of the words?
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://www.trimboli.name/
> 
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