[1450] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: relative clauses (yet again!)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Aug 25 20:33:33 1993
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1993 09:09:16 +1000 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <MAILQUEUE-101.930825095910.288@fs1.metallurgy.umist.ac.uk> from "
A.APPLEYARD@fs1.mt.umist.ac.uk" at Aug 25, 93 09:59:10 am
> > Can you REALLY imagine a Klingon, with a straight face, saying, "the ship
> from which I flew"? Get real. A Klingon would just point to the view screen,
> or name the ship, or just pull out a disruptor and mark the spot on the
> tactical display.
Tsk, tsk. I have this Klingon yaS here, securely tied to a chair,
so he can't budge a hair, let alone a finger, and I've been
interrogating him. And that's precisely what he's just told me
"the ship from which I flew". Of course, he must be lying through
his teeth. I'm not even going to tell you how he said "the ship
from which..." because, if he's leading me around the garden path
about that, he probably is too about Klingon grammar.
Seriously, now. This business of relative clauses is interesting.
As I wrote earlier, some languages have nothing like our relative
clauses. To elevate the debate a bit, a relative clause is very
much, functionally, like a demonstrative adjective. In fact, in
fact... isn't a demonstrative adjective to a relative clause as
a pronoun to a noun phrase? A pronoun replaces a noun phrase;
a demonstrative adjective replaces a relative clause. What is
fundamentally different, in Klingon, from any other language
I know is that the antecedent of the relative clause is part
of the relative clause. Consider again "yaS qIppu'bogh" and "qIppu'bogh
yaS". No human language I know does that. If Klingon were a human
language, and "qIppu'bogh yaS" meant "the officer who hit him",
then "yaS qIppu'bogh" would mean "he who hit the officer".
But Klingon works as if "officer" was part of the relative
clause. So that a Klingon relative clause is not similar in
function to a demonstrative adjective, but to a ....
demonstrative adverb perhaps? The closest that comes to my mind
now (perhaps wrongly) is the Latin ablative absolute.
I'm lost. More later, perhaps.
