[86792] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Sentences as objects
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Thu Nov 5 07:50:39 2009
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:47:14 -0500
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
In-reply-to: <1cb7130b0911042003j1ce07a67l2f179ab97f34f028@mail.gmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Tracy Canfield wrote:
> I am still sorting through these to see what patterns they suggest, but
> here's something that jumped out:
> yIntaH qIrq 'e' vIneH.
> Kirk I want alive.
> "I want that Kirk keeps living." (STConst)
>
> 'e' neHbe' vavwI'
> That wasn't what my father wanted. ST6
>
> TKD 6.2.5 says "When the verb of the second sentence is neH 'want', neither
> 'e' nor net is used." With two occurrences of neH with 'e' in the corpus,
> can we safely say that 'e' is optional with neH?
No, we can't. TKD gives us the "best practice rules" of Klingon.
Anything from Okrand that seems to violate those rules are exceptional,
unless they appear with extreme regularity, or he explains the new rule.
We can speculate as to why we see apparent violations, but we can't
generalize new rules from them.
I believe (without evidence) that your second example occurs because
Azetbur, who spoke the line, was using someone else's sentence as the
object of her sentence. There may be a rule, not given in TKD, that says
it's all right to use {'e'} with {neH} when you haven't actually
supplied the previous sentence yourself.
Other explanations are possible. Maybe Azetbur misspoke. Maybe {'e'} is
allowed for emphasis. We can only speculate; we cannot make new rules.
TKD gives us only the most basic rules; the more subtle ones and the
exceptions usually do not appear. The saving grace of this is that we
are told most Klingons won't even notice that we're using baby talk.
--
SuStel
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