[Tlhingan-hol] Type 5 on first noun

[De'vID]

SuStel:
> The words aren't arbitrarily placed together. He didn't give us {'uQ'a'[;]
> QamchIy}. He put them together in the REVERSE order of the English original.
> He went out of his way to rearrange them. There is only one reason why he'd
> do this: because the arrangement had some meaning.

Agreed.

SuStel:
> The order of the words in English is important for their meaning. It's not
> "at Qamchee; the feast." The English consists of a phrase in which a
> prepositional phrase ("at Qamchee") modifies a noun ("feast").
>
> Okrand describes in TKD how type 5 noun suffixes perform a function like
> prepositions. Saying {QamchIyDaq} is like saying the prepositional phrase
> "at Qamchee."
>
> Okrand also describes in TKD how one noun can be put in front of another
> noun to modify its meaning. Speaking from experience, I know that when you
> do this a lot, it becomes very natural; it's one of the quickest things a
> student of Klingon learns to do. You can do it almost without thinking.

And in TKD 6.1, he says "Any noun in the sentence indicating something
other than subject or object comes first, before the object noun."
Speaking from experience, it's also very natural to instinctively move
a noun to the beginning when it has {-Daq} or another type 5 suffix.
As Qov said, a type 5 suffix is like a wall.

Also, {'uQ'a' QamchIyDaq} is very clearly wrong, for the meaning he
wanted to express. It means "at the feast's Qam-Chee".

So I agree that Okrand deliberately put {QamchIyDaq} in front of
{'uQ'a'}. I also agree that it's possible that he was trying to form a
noun-noun construction and forgot the rule about type 5 suffixes on
the first noun. But it's not the only hypothesis that can explain the
result.

Perhaps different parts of Klingon grammar just feel more
instinctively natural to different people. It seems that for many
speakers, "{-Daq} goes in front" and "no {-Daq} on the first noun of a
noun-noun" are instinctive, which is why, when seeing {QamchIyDaq
'uQ'a'}, it looks like a locative followed by a stand-alone noun. Your
instincts are apparently different. Without access to Okrand's mind,
we simply don't know why he put those words together in that way.

SuStel:
> We can come up with ludicrous justifications for these things all we want,
> but that's akin to saying that Okrand never makes mistakes, and anything
> that looks like one was an intentional bit of new grammar.

Yes, but unlike your other examples, there's a perfectly reasonable
alternate explanation for his mistake. For experienced speakers, it's
not ludicrous to instinctively put a {-Daq} noun in front without
intending to form a noun-noun construction. Now, Okrand isn't an
experienced speaker, and we simply don't know his thought process when
he put those words together, so this doesn't prove anything.

SuStel:
> Labels are written, not spoken. These labels are written in the roman
> transcription. The transcription has punctuation. We can conclude nothing
> about Klingon grammar from this.

Assuming that it's a straight transcription of what a Klingon would've
written, we can conclude that Klingons don't follow sentence grammar
when writing labels.

De'vID:
>> Because he wrote the Klingon translations to match the English
>> originals he was given:
>>
>> {telDaq wovmoHwI'mey} "Wing Lights"

SuStel:
> He could have written {tel wovmoHwI'mey}, but he didn't.

Other things on the wing are already labeled with {telDaq}, so he's
just being consistent. Also, {tel wovmoHwI'mey} has an ambiguous
meaning.

De'vID:
>> {nISwI' talmey: cha' (telDaq lujomlu')}
>> "Disruptor Cannon - 2 (Wing Mounted)"
>>
>> {nISwI': cha' chang'engmey (telDaq lujomlu', nItebHa' lubaHlu')}
>> "Disruptor - 2 Pairs (Wing Mounted, Fire Linked)"

SuStel:
> So these are therefore not evidence that a "missing" sentence exists, since
> he's just translating what he was given in English.
>
> See?

When given an explicit "Wing Mounted", he wrote {telDaq lujomlu'}.
When given something implicitly wing-mounted, he wrote {telDaq}. I
think that's parallel enough to the English. The English "mounted",
and the Klingon {lujomlu'[pu'bogh]), are implied.

De'vID:
>> Considering that {muDDaq 'eDSeHcha lulaQlu'bogh} also appears on the
>> poster, assuming that Okrand did all the translations together, he
>> would've presumably been aware that you can't stick {telDaq} or
>> {muDDaq} in front of another noun to form a noun-noun construction.

SuStel:
> When you're not constructing a verbal clause, you're not looking to attach a
> -Daq noun to a verb. But if you still want a -Daq noun, you're potentially
> going to attach it to whatever word you DO have, especially if that's
> exactly what happens in the English. In the case of the verbal clause, the
> question of an illegal noun-noun would never even have occurred to Okrand
> because he wasn't trying to form one.
>
> In other words, this proves nothing at all about whether Okrand was aware of
> the restriction or not. It only demonstrates that you can't fall afoul of it
> when you're building a verbal clause.

But why did he try to build a verbal clause, as opposed to writing
{muDDaq 'eDSeHcha}, in the first place, when the original English is
just a noun? Presumably, he realised that {muDDaq 'eDSeHcha} conveys
the wrong meaning, and that a verb was necessary in that case. I also
presume that he thought about the meaning of {telDaq wovmoHwI'mey} and
didn't think a verb was necessary to convey the right meaning. But
neither of us have access to what he was thinking at the time (and I
doubt that he himself remembers), so anything we might try to guess is
just pure conjecture.

-- 
De'vID