[86078] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Klingon translation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghunchu'wI')
Sat Jun 27 20:08:05 2009
In-Reply-To: <f60fe000906271608u71632d47o1ad9dbde0e0c4e97@mail.gmail.com>
From: "ghunchu'wI'" <qunchuy@alcaco.net>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:05:49 -0400
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Jun 27, 2009, at 7:08 PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>> Here is such a construction: "I know who stole the money."
>> Another: "I wonder when the rock will fall."
>
> The second one has an argument for legitimate question-as-object,
> since it could be rendered as "I wonder, when will the rock fall?".
Fine, make it "I don't know when the rock will fall" and that
argument vanishes.
> [...]
>
>> (Note that these really are the English interrogatives and not the
>> often-identical-looking relative pronouns. For a clear example of
>> the difference: "I don't remember what he is wearing." The word
>> used here is "what", not "that".)
>
> This is still the same problem, though. What you don't remember is
> not the question, but the answer to the question.
What makes this problem really interesting is that these are using
question words but they aren't really asking questions. What isn't
being remembered here is not the question, true. But it isn't the
answer to the question either. It's at a different level than any
specific clothing, being something like the entire class of possible
answers to a question that wasn't quite asked.
I have no concrete reason to believe that the Klingon pronoun {'e'}
can express this sort of thing. If it can't, I don't know any other
Klingon grammar that can do it either. One would have to recast the
idea significantly...which is, of course, what I actually do anyway.
-- ghunchu'wI'
