[85496] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Question problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Terrence Donnelly)
Wed May 20 10:54:02 2009
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 07:52:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: Terrence Donnelly <terrence.donnelly@sbcglobal.net>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
In-Reply-To: <CC5A5A97-8E02-49A6-9B1D-7D746420C097@embarqmail.com>
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
--- On Wed, 5/20/09, Doq <doq@embarqmail.com> wrote:
> From: Doq <doq@embarqmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Question problem
> To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
> Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 6:44 AM
> We were told that question words take the place of the words
> that
> answer them. {nuq} is treated grammatically like the noun
> it replaces.
> The answer could be the same sentence with {nuq} replaced
> by the noun
> that answers the question. I had thought that discussions
> similarly
> took the "beginning" question words as
> adverbials.
>
> My mistake, I guess.
>
> Of course, that doesn't resolve why we should prefer to
> have the
> adverbial or the question word first, except to mimic the
> English word
> order preference.
>
Well, not completely. I think a good argument could be made that it is most logical to put the most important words first in an utterance, and the question word in a question can plausibly be called the most important word. Just because English and Klingon came to the same conclusion doesn't invalidate it.
-- ter'eS
