[83965] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Missing question words
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Mon Jan 14 13:53:14 2008
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:50:23 -0500
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
In-reply-to: <F243BDF6-215D-482C-AE67-D6C2372594F6@insightbb.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Alan Anderson wrote:
> ja' SuStel:
>
>> How happy are you?
>> How beautiful is she?
>> How loyal is the captain?
>>
>> Those are the difficult ones.
>
>
> From one point of view, they're trivial:
>
> bIQuch'a'?
> 'IH'a' ghaH?
> matlh'a' HoD?
>
> If the correct answer isn't {HIja'} or {ghobe'}, the person
> responding will probably give you the answer you need.
We're not just out to elicit a specific response; we want to express
ourselves correctly. These questions do not ask what we want to ask.
> If you really want to be explicit about requesting a relative measure
> of the quality, here are a few ways to do it:
>
> QuchtaHghach 'ar Daghaj?
> SoH Quch law' 'Iv Quch puS?
> bIQuchmo', nuq Darur?
>
> These are the ones that come immediately to mind. There are
> undoubtedly other ways to ask the question. I don't consider it a
> difficult issue at all.
Sure, there are other ways to say these things, but they require
complete recasting. None are as straightforward as nuq 'ab HoD
Qanqor/How tall is Captain Krankor?
Each of your proposals, by the way, requires an answer that doesn't
exactly match the question.
QuchtaHghach 'ar Daghaj?
How much continued happiness do you have?
What's the answer? {cha' pa' tebbogh QuchtaHghach vIghaj}? Surely not;
it's something like {jIQuchqu'} or {jIH Quch law' Hoch Quch puS}.
Therefore, you're asking a question about {QuchtaHghach} and not
expecting an answer about {QuchtaHghach}. Without a Happy Meter (TM), we
cannot expect a direct answer to this question. And that's assuming that
one can "have" happiness in Klingon.
Your second sentence is only a question by intonation; we don't have a
convenient way to turn comparative sentences into questions. And even if
we did, your question is too specific; instead of asking for a
description of one's happiness, you're asking for a comparison to
someone else's.
The third relies on idioms. In other words, the method itself dodges the
problem by not qualifying the happiness at all. And I find it a little
absurd for a Klingon commander to ask his subordinate, {bImatlhmo' nuq
Darur?} (targhlIj vIrur...? targhoywIj matlh 'Iv? SoH! HIja', SoH!}
These are all perfectly valid workarounds, but they don't actually ask
"How happy are you?"
SuStel
Stardate 8037.7
--
Practice the Klingon language on the tlhIngan Hol MUSH.
http://trimboli.name/klingon/mush.html
