[251] in tlhIngan-Hol
One-armed and two-armed relatives with <-bogh>
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Mar 26 13:07:31 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Allan C. Wechsler <ACW@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1992 12:22-0500
Consider:
(1) qIppu'bogh yaS vIlegh. ("I see the officer who hit her.")
(2) yaS qIppu'bogh vIlegh. ("I see the officer (who(m)) she hit.")
Call the verb that bears <-bogh> the "relativized verb"; in this case
<qIppu'>. Notice that the relativized verb in these cases has only one
explicit argument, although the verb is definitely transitive and ought
to be able to bear two arguments. All constructions with <-bogh> in
Okrand have this "one-armed" property.
Now, in English, we can certainly say:
(3) I see the robot who hit the officer.
(4) I see the officer (who(m)) the robot hit.
In both cases the relativized sentence is "the robot hit the officer".
In (3) and (4), I say just who it was that I saw, by juggling word order
and the relativizing particle "who".
How the heck can we do this in Klingon?
(5) yaS qIppu'bogh qoq vIlegh
Sentence (5) is possibly ungrammatical -- there are certainly no
examples like it in Okrand. If it is grammatical, then it is certainly
ambiguous -- there is no hint of whether I see the subject or object of
the relativized sentence. What mechanism in Klingon corresponds to the
English in (3) and (4)?
If I had to guess, I would guess that this is done with the topicalizer
<-'e'>. Thus, (3) could be rendered as
(6) yaS qIppu'bogh qoq'e' vIlegh
and (4) as
(7) yaS'e' qIppu'bogh qoq vIlegh
Other possible mechanisms include other suffixes (perhaps <-qu'> or
<-na'>, but more likely one we've never seen), word order, as in
(7') * qIppu'bogh qoq yaS vIlegh
or perhaps one or two as-yet-unseen relativizing suffixes, like <-bogh>,
but specialized to select subject or object as the relativized argument.
With what we know now, I propose <'e'> as a stopgap.
