[83960] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Missing question words
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Doq)
Mon Jan 14 11:31:31 2008
From: Doq <doq@embarqmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
In-Reply-To: <478B812C.6070109@trimboli.name>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:29:04 -0500
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Thanks for the insightful response. You provoke many interesting
thoughts.
As for the topic issue, I get a sense that you want to require
distance to be the topic of the paragraph instead of just topic of the
sentence. I think you can have a paragraph about my home that contains
a sentence that has 1,000 miles as the topic of that sentence. It is
the most significant fact packed in that sentence, and it does not fit
well into either the subject or object role in Klingon.
So, you'd get:
Dun juHwIj'e'. 'IH Hatlh. quv nuvpu'. wa'SaD qelI'qam'e' Hop. vaj
ghaytanHa' Dalegh.
The thousand qelI'qam is not the topic of the paragraph, but it is the
topic of the sentence within the paragraph.
I think that high school English classes drum into us the association
between "topic" and "paragraph". A "sentence", we are taught, is a
collection of words expressing a "complete thought" (whatever THAT
is), while a paragraph is a collection of sentences about one
"topic" (whatever THAT is). They drill these definitions into us until
it is subconscious. We don't even think about how absurdly vague these
definitions are. We just have this permanent link between "sentence/
complete thought" and "paragraph/topic".
Pop a flash card that says, "sentence" in front of us and we say,
"complete thought". Pop a flash card with "paragraph" in front of us
and we say, "topic". The cortex is not involved. This is burned into
our BIOS, somewhere in the medula oblongata.
So, we don't really have a concept of allowing a sentence to have a
topic that is not related to the topic of the larger paragraph. I'm
suspecting that Klingon sentences can have separate topics.
Does this make sense to you, or do you think that each sentence in a
paragraph can only have, as topic, the topic of the paragraph?
Doq
On Jan 14, 2008, at 10:35 AM, David Trimboli wrote:
> 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
>
> --
> Practice the Klingon language on the tlhIngan Hol MUSH.
> http://trimboli.name/klingon/mush.html
>
>
