[83910] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Topic (was: Specifying distance traveled)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Thu Jan 10 02:40:52 2008
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 02:36:30 -0500
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
In-reply-to: <AB84ABCD-AEC5-4CBB-8976-756D89219997@insightbb.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Alan Anderson wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2008, at 6:50 PM, David Trimboli wrote:
>
>> Here's what I think is a pretty simple example of a topic in use:
>>
>> Qel'e' SID vor ghaH
>> As for the doctor, he cured the patient.
>
>
> It's simple, yes, but is it correct? The topic suffix doesn't move
> the subject of the sentence to the front. I can't see expressing
> the idea as anything but {SID vor Qel'e'}. (Maybe you can supply
> supporting context that would make this example seem less broken, but
> it would probably cease to be simple at that point.)
{Qel'e'} isn't the subject of this sentence, {ghaH} is, all on its own,
just as validly as if the sentence were simply {SID vor ghaH}.
I used a pronoun to make the sentence more natural, but it could just as
easily have been
Qel'e' SID vor Qel
This would be no different than saying, for instance,
HoDvaD Duj ra'choH HoD
perhaps implying that the captain had selfish motives in taking command
of the ship. Or even
QelvaD SID vor Qel
implying the same of the doctor curing his patient. This sort of
redundancy occurs in Klingon and is appropriate. The header noun isn't a
migrated subject; it plays a distinct semantic role in the sentence,
just as any other noun with a type 5 suffix on it.
> The whole idea of "header topics" makes me uneasy anyway. {-'e'} is
> a syntactic marker, identifying the role of the noun in a sentence.
> Most of the discussion of putting it on a "header" noun uses
> examples where that noun doesn't really *have* a clear role in the
> sentence -- and saying "the role is the _topic_" doesn't help me.
> Most of the time I see it used here, it's more the "topic of
> conversation" rather than anything to do with the action of the
> sentence.
"Topic of conversation" seems an apt description to me; nothing wrong
with that.
> The one relevant canon example I can think of is a comparative
> construction, which doesn't follow the regular rules of word order in
> the first place, making it incompletely suitable as a pattern for
> general usage.
There are many examples of {-'e'} indicating a topic, but none of them
are absolutely unambiguous. However, using {-'e'} in this way precisely
follows the rules in TKD.
3.3.5
-'e' topic
This suffix emphasizes that the noun to which it is attached is the
topic of the sentence.
6.1
Any noun in the sentence indicating something other than subject or
object comes first, before the object noun.
Each of those rules has a "yeah, but" attached to it, but they still
stand as correct rules. One of their consequences is that a noun
indicating the topic of a sentence which isn't a subject or object
becomes a header.
This is not the sort of construction I'd expect to see a whole lot of in
regular usage. It certainly should NOT be used as a catch-all
I-couldn't-think-of-anyplace-else-to-put-it crutch. It should ONLY be
used to indicate exactly what the rules say it is: a non-subject,
non-object topic.
It's at LEAST as valid as, say, picking up on a description of English
grammar in TKD, combining it with a bizarre and singular example, and
insisting that Klingon can do "where" relative clauses. :)
SuStel
Stardate 8025.4
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