[Tlhingan-hol] Type 5 on first noun

[lojmIttI'wI'nuv]

SuStel,

I accept your critique of me for misrepresenting much of your argument here. You are quite right. I had misattributed things that someone else had said to you. The thread has been long, and interwoven text has made my mistake easy to make. I apologize quite sincerely for my confusion.

I understand now that you have never had the motive of removing the rule that Type 5 noun suffixes cannot be applied to any but the last noun in a noun-noun genitive construction. I understand now that my erroneous assertion that you were fixated on genitive constructions was at best a massive and unfair exaggeration. I publicly apologize. This is as close as I can come to undoing the damage I’ve done. Were that I could do more.

There remain differences between our opinions of the examples in question, like {telDaq wovwI’mey}. Unless I am once again mistaken, you think this is an error, and I don’t. You object to the assumption that the grammar is incomplete because it lacks a verb, yet should still be treated as if it applies to an unstated verb. You have, I believe, scorned this idea, unless I have misattributed this once again.

My point is that a title or label does not have the requirement of being a single phrase. You seem to require that. Your assertion appears to be that {telDaq wovwI’mey} is an illegal phrase, while I assert that it is two, legal, single-word phrases.

We agree that it’s a sentence fragment. It’s good to have points of agreement.

You say the two words should not go together. I say the two words are fine together so long as they both apply to the same missing verb. Sentence fragments can do that. “With a friend on a ship” could easily be the title of a photograph or painting. You’d have to actually see the photo or painting to tell who is with the friend, but clearly, even alone with the title, you can assume that both friends are on a ship. You don’t know what they are doing there, or if it’s docked or on the ocean or a river. You don’t know much, because it’s a sentence fragment, but you know two things that would be elements of the same complete statement.

English is rather noun-centric. In this example, both “with a friend” and “on a ship” describe the same noun — the unidentified friend of the friend. If anything, it’s the incompleteness of the title that draws one to want to look at the photograph.

So, I accept the idea that in a ship’s diagram, a title giving two different elements of context about the same depiction might be enough to add to the visual evidence presented by the poster to entice us to look closely at this feature. You see {telDaq} in a label next to the wing and you see {wovwI'mey}, which draws your attention to the lights. That’s what the poster is trying to make you notice. It’s goal is achieved without needing a complete sentence, and there’s no requirement that the words fit nicely together in one complete phrase.

The requirement that it be one complete phrase is at least as forced as the idea that both phrases could be applied to the same missing verb. The main difference is that the forced requirement that they both form one noun phrase implies an error in canon, and the other implies that it isn’t an error and it’s easy to understand. People generally do understand it, and the understanding that most people have when they see it is pretty much the same, and that probably should stand as evidence that forcing the two nouns to each have a grammatical relationship to an unstated verb makes sense to most people.

English has prepositions. Klingon doesn’t. Instead, Klingon has the locative noun suffix that establishes the location of the action of a verb, or it has nouns that represent prepositional relationships, like {bIng} or {Dung}. {Duj bIng} would refer to the area under a ship. {Duj bIngDaq} would establish that location as the location of the action of a verb. That’s the only thing adding the suffix does to the noun phrase {Duj bIng}.

As for shooting elephants, for the purposes of Klingon grammar, the action of shooting occurs both at the shooter and the target simultaneously. The shooting involves both locations. That’s why shooting an elephant in my pajamas could place with either me or the elephant in the pajamas.

The action of seeing lights on the wings similarly occurs for both the seer and the seen. The location of the action doesn’t establish which is on the wing. Either could be. But looking at the poster, you can tell that the lights are on the wings. In this case, the picture tells 998 words. The poster provides the other two.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Feb 11, 2016, at 3:25 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> ...
> Okrand has never addressed "cat in the hat." He HAS addressed "elephant in my pajamas," but it was in regards to whether a syntactic noun applied to a relative clause or a main clause:
> 
>   One of the things you talk about was ambiguity. "{DujDaq puq
>   DaqIppu'bogh vIlegh}," <I see the child who you hit on the ship>, or
>   <on the ship I see the child...> and that's ambiguous. I thought
>   about it and I said "That's fine." And it's ambiguous in exactly the
>   same way that English is. You want ambiguity in language, I would
>   think. It's not math.
> 
>    I was reading this bit about "I see the child you hit on the ship,"
>    and for whatever reason what popped into my head was Groucho
>    Marx, that old Groucho Marx joke, you know, "I just shot an
>    elephant in my pajamas... and how he got in my pajamas I'll never
>    know." You can say that in Klingon, no problem; they'll get the
>    joke. There's not many jokes you can get to translate into Klingon,
>    but that one would work.
> 
>>> Do you understand what genitive means now?
>> 
>> I credit you for making me think about what genitive means far more than
>> I ever had before in the context of Klingon, especially since Okrand
>> never mentions the word in any of his materials.
> 
> Because, as usual, he is writing for the layman, not the linguist, and provides simplified terms for complex topics.
> 
>> It’s like Jon Stewart’s revamping of the Fox News motto: “Fair and
>> balanced… if it were true.”
> 
> Don't ever compare me with Fox News.

That was not my intent, but I see the insult. I would similarly feel insulted by any such association, so it’s good to have one more thing in the Universe we agree on. I apologize for what, in this case, actually was a quite unintentional insult.

>> It would be illegal if it were genitive. You reject the suggestion from
>> several of us that it’s not genitive, so you insist that it is illegal,
>> and since it’s canon, that suggests that the rule should be eliminated
>> so that the canon then becomes legal.
> 
> Nonsense. Utter nonsense.
> 
> I say it's far more likely that Okrand simply didn't notice he was violating a rule when he translated these phrases, than that he had a special phrasing in mind that totally fails to appear, like "on the wings, (there are) lights."
> 
> One or two violations of the rule does not mean the rule is invalid, and I challenge you to show me where I ever said such a thing ('cause I didn't). My original post was simply, "Lookee here! A rule broken!”

I get it. I just don’t think it’s a broken rule because I don’t see this as a noun noun construction at all. But you have elsewhere stated that you already understand that this is my perspective.

> Just as I'm not going to demand the elimination of {net} because Okrand has occasionally used {'e' Xlu'}, so I'm not demanding the elimination of the N5-N rule because he has occasionally broken it.

Yep. Okrand is definitely capable of error in canon. I completely agree that his {‘e’ Xlu’} canon is simply badly spoken Klingon. 

> ...
> 
>> You really want the location to modify the second noun, but Klingon
>> grammar simply prevents it.{-Daq} on one noun never modifies another
>> noun. It modifies verbs. It modifies action. It does not modify nouns.
> 
> HENCE IT IS AN ILLEGAL NOUN-NOUN.
> 
> Let's try something else. Can you demonstrate, WITHOUT INVOKING THE NO-SYNTAX-MARKER-ON-N1 RULE, that {telDaq wovmoHwI'mey} is not a genitive construct?

Yes.

The presence of {-Daq} on the first noun defines the grammatical relationship of that noun to a verb. It makes it a complete phrase. It is grammatically meaningless without the assumption of a verb somewhere in the aether just as the phrase “without you” has a different kind of grammatical meaning than just “you”. Klingon uses a suffix instead of a helper word. We grammatically alter the function of {tel} by adding {-Daq}. It is no longer grammatically qualified to participate in any noun phrase that follows. It’s relationship is defined as being with a verb, not a noun.

If anything, the rule exists just to make it clear to anyone who somehow might not otherwise have figured this out. It’s like putting a sign on a guardrail between a road and a cliff that says “Don’t drive over this guardrail”. You shouldn’t need the rule to know that you don’t do this in a noun-noun construction, if you understood Klingon grammar, but hey, if you are still learning and you don’t understand this very well, here’s something you shouldn’t try doing.

> Why not invoke that rule? Because my point is that the rule is violated. If I tried to prove that you were breaking the law by speeding, you can't defend yourself by saying that 30 miles per hour was the speed limit so you couldn't have been speeding.

Several people have repeatedly told you that in order for this to be a violation of the rule, you have to assume that it is a noun-noun genitive construction, and we don’t make that assumption. There isn’t a reason to. There are other explanations.

It’s a sentence fragment. We are not given enough context to know what the rest of the sentence would be. We can no more assume that these words belong to the same phrase than we can assume that they are not, in terms of what is missing, but looking at what is present, we have reason to believe that they do not belong to the same phrase.

>> It’s an alien concept. Klingons are aliens. They can do that.
>> 
>>> Reading it as "at the wing, (there are) lights" is forced.
>> 
>> Interpreting a noun with {-Daq} as modifying another noun is forced.
> 
> Interpreting a noun with {-Daq} as ERRONEOUSLY modifying another noun is not forced. Okrand goofed. Simple.

If you want to start off with the assumption that he goofed, sure. But that assumption is no more justified than is the assumption that this is a sentence fragment that includes nouns with different grammatical relationships to a common unstated verb.

> Do you go to such lengths to interpret TKD's {lujpu' jIH'e'} "I, and only I, have failed" as not an error?

Long ago, you proved your insight into the Klingon language by pointing out how poorly Okrand described the apparent dual function of {-‘e’} as what he describes (topic) and what he provides examples for (emphasis). This looks like an interesting error, in the obvious omission of the prefix {jI-}, which would be redundant to the doubly emphatic {jIH’e’}. The presence of the pronoun at all already suggests emphasis. Adding {-‘e’} is sufficiently emphatic to suggest the speaker is probably screaming.

But all that aside, {lump’ jIH’e’} is depicted as a complete sentence in the literal textbook of Klingon grammar. It’s not a sentence fragment. It’s a mistake. He does make mistakes.

I see that you are suggesting that since we know he makes mistakes, it’s okay to assume in the case of {telDaq wovwI'mey}, he made another one. I just don’t happen to agree that in {telDaq wovwI'mey} is either a mistake or a breaking of the rule. It’s like saying that someone driving down the highway 70MPH where the posted speed limit is 70MPH is speeding because in the city, the speed limit is 25MPH. He’s not in the city. He’s on the highway.

Okrand is not claiming that {telDaq wovwI’mey} is a noun-noun genitive construction. I’m not claiming that it is. A lot of other people are not claiming that it is. You are claiming that it is, and that it’s a badly constructed one.

It’s like saying that an apple is a badly constructed orange. Perhaps if it grew on an orange tree, that might be the case, but that’s not where it’s growing.

I have made many errors in this thread. Continuing the argument over the remaining points does not imply that I don’t regret my errors or fail to acknowledge them. I am not ignoring you or the things you are saying. I’m not disrespecting your skill or history with the language. I’m having an honest disagreement over how to interpret a sentence fragment presented as a title or label.

> -- 
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Tlhingan-hol mailing list
> Tlhingan-hol at kli.org
> http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20160212/87a671f9/attachment-0001.html>