[204] in tlhIngan-Hol
From the Grammarian's Desk
dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Feb 16 19:20:26 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: krankor@IMA.ISC.COM (Captain Krankor)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Sat, 8 Feb 92 09:29:25 -0500
Greetings, all. Here's some grammar tidbits I've been meaning
to post for some time now.
Consider the following English sentence: "I never saw the captain
hit the officer." How would you render this in English?
The first attempt might well be this:
not yaS qIppu' HoD 'e' vIlegh
However, this would be very liable to be interpreted as "I
saw that the captain never hit the officer"-- not quite the same
thing. It seems that we want to somehow get that "not" adverbial
together with the legh verb. Yet we know that, for the most part,
adverbials are supposed to go at the beginning of sentences, aren't
they?
Well there are several places you might try putting the "not",
but the correct one turns out to be rather counter-intuitive. The
correct translation is:
yaS qIppu' HoD not 'e' vIlegh
Now calm down, stop screaming, it really does make sense. {{:-)
In describing the 'e' sentence construction, the dictionary has
this to say:
Klingon has two special *pronouns*, 'e' and net, which refer to
the previous sentence as a whole...They are always treated as
the object of the verb...What is a single sentence in English is
often *two* sentences in Klingon. (6.2.5, p 65. Emphasis added)
This is important to remember. If one is lax, one can fall in
to the pit of starting to think of that little 'e' as a kind of
conjunction, but remember, it is not: it is a pronoun, the object of
the verb, and sentences that use this construction are not sentences
at all, they are *pairs* of sentences. The examples that follow on
p 66 continue to stress the fact that each example is in fact two
Klingon sentences. Admittedly, we don't punctuate it that way when
we add terran punctuation (the dict is totally silent about
punctuation), nor do I think we should, for clarity sake, but still,
grammatically, they are two sentences. So let's look again at our
two translations:
not yaS qIppu' HoD 'e' vIlegh
yaS qIppu' HoD not 'e' vIlegh
If we split each of these into the separate sentences that they
really are, we get:
[not yaS qIppu' HoD] ['e' vIlegh]
[yaS qIppu' HoD] [not 'e' vIlegh]
Now it is much clearer to see. The first one clearly means "I saw
that the captain never hit the officer", whereas the second means "I
never saw the captain hit the officer", which is what we wanted.
Our adverbial is at the beginning of a sentence, right where it is
supposed to be.
I pleasant side-effect of all this is that it answers something
I had rather wondered about. Could one use 'e' to mean the sentence
someone has just spoken to *you*? The answer would clearly appear
to be 'yes'. Thus:
crewman: vavwI' ghaH HoD'e' "The captain is my father."
me: 'e' vISovbe' "I didn't know that."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I stumbled onto this issue by way of someone from the list to whom
I was talking to on TinyTIM one time a while back, who was trying to
do the sentence "I have never tried to speak Klingonese", or something
like that. I had intended to give him credit for raising the issue
and forcing me to find the solution, but instead I'm forced to give him
my apologies, for I've forgotten who it was I was talking to. I am
humbled. {{:-(
A reminder, by the way: If you wanna practice some more interactive
Klingonese, I'm often found on TinyTIM. If I'm not on, page R'nice,
he can usually find me. TIM's address has changed since I last
mentioned this; the current address is: foof.dorm.clarkson.edu,
port 5440. That's 128.153.48.3 5440. C'mon by and say 'nuqneH'
{{:-)
--From the Grammarian's Desk,
Krankor
