[83959] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Missing question words
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Mon Jan 14 10:37:57 2008
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:35:08 -0500
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
In-reply-to: <D57E6302-6137-45FF-A600-05B5D3EB50D4@embarqmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Doq wrote:
> It just hit me -- a eureka moment. Try to translate the following
> questions:
>
> "How far is it to the next city?"
> "How cold is it outside?"
> "How tall is Captain Krankor?"
> "How high is that {cha'qu'} which flies overhead?"
> "How deep is that {puch}?
Yeah, "how <quality>?" has always been tough.
Anything that actually asks for a measurement isn't too hard, though,
and that's what all your examples ask for. More difficult are subjective
or measurement-less qualities:
How happy are you?
How beautiful is she?
How loyal is the captain?
Those are the difficult ones.
I can ask some of your examples questions like so:
naDevvo' veng vebDaq nuq 'ab chuq?
How far is it to the next city? (What is the distance from here to
the next city?)
nuq 'ab HoD Qanqor?
How tall is Captain Krankor? (What height does Captain Krankor have?)
yavvo' DungDaq puvbogh cha'qu'Daq nuq 'ab chuq?
How high is that cha'qu' which flies overhead? (What is the distance
from the ground to
the cha'qu' which
flies overhead?)
puchvetlh yuvtlhe'vo' puchvetlh bIS'ubDaq nuq 'ab chuq?
How deep is that toilet? (What is the distance from that toilet's lid
to that toilet's interior bottom?)
Asking about temperature is harder, since I don't believe we have any
words for Klingon temperature units or a question word asking for its
measurement. You can, of course, simply ask:
nuq 'oH Hat'e'?
> That brings me back to the suggestion that, IF {'e'} CAN BE USED AS
> TOPIC, then it makes sense to use it to talk about how far one
> travels, because, given the Klingon apparent lack of curiosity
> concerning measurement, why bother measuring the distance if that's
> not the topic? Either it's the topic, or you wouldn't bother
> mentioning it.
>
> This would allow us to say things like:
>
> wa'SaD qelI'qam'e' Hop juHwIj.
What if {juHwIj} is the topic of conversation? Then you couldn't do
this, which suggests to me that making the distance the topic is still
just forcing it into a role to which it doesn't belong.
You could, for instance, be talking about how wonderful your home is
while you're away on a business trip.
Dun juHwIj'e'. 'IH Hatlh, quv nuvpu'... 'ach [because it's a thousand
kellicams away], not Dalegh!
Ignoring the "because" syntax for now, the topic of this passage isn't
really the thousand kellicams, it's my home. Making it the topic would
be an artificial assignment.
On the other hand, if you really, REALLY were talking primarily about
those thousand kellicams, then I'd accept {wa'SaD qelI'qam'e' Hop juHwIj}.
> I can't think of another way of saying "My home is a thousand qelI'qam
> from here." I certainly can't come up with a way to say it anywhere
> nearly this concisely. According to the recently quoted interview on
> deixis, {Hop} doesn't take a direct object.
naDevvo' juHwIjDaq wa'SaD qelI'qam 'ab chuq.
SuStel
Stardate 8037.3
--
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