[85533] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: nuq bach?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brent Kesler)
Tue May 26 17:03:37 2009
In-Reply-To: <C305E6BD33E2654DAE1F8F403247B6A6924378ED93@EVS02.ad.uchicago.edu>
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:01:09 -0700
From: Brent Kesler <brent.of.all.people@gmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Steven Boozer <sboozer@uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> One quibble... {'IvDaq bachchu' yaS} feels odd/hyper-correct, a bit like "(At) Whom did the officer
> shoot" does in 21st century American English. Grammatically correct, yet stilted.
Coming from the Midwest, I'm fine with this construction. "Who'd the
officer shoot at?" (Say it with a slight twang).
> nuqDaq bachchu' yaS?
> "Where did the officer shoot?"
> (i.e. where did the shooting occur?)
I think this sentence is ambiguous. It can mean "Where did the
shooting occur?" or "What did the officer shoot at?" It depends on
whether Klingons treat {nuqDaq} as meaning only a question word for
locations or as a composition of {nuq} + {Daq}. And {-Daq} itself is
ambiguous; it can motion towards a location or an action at a
location. It's a distinction English makes better than Klingon.
> nuq bachchu' yaS?
> What did the officer shoot?
> (i.e. what did the officer shoot at?)
If I heard this question, I'd probably answer something like {nISwI'}.
So if {nuq} can also mean "what target" in this case, we have another
ambiguous sentence.
It looks like if one sentence is decidable, the other must be
ambiguous. Languages do this sometimes [shrugs].
bI'reng
