[86795] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Sentences as objects
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Lytle)
Thu Nov 5 19:51:55 2009
In-Reply-To: <4AF2C952.5090309@trimboli.name>
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 19:49:34 -0500
From: Steven Lytle <lytlesw@gmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 7:47 AM, David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name> wrote:
> 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
> tlhIngan Hol MUSH
> http://trimboli.name/mush
>
>
>
>
Another issue with Azetbur's usage of {'e'} with {neHbe'} is that without
{'e'}, {neH} would have "no" way to say what its subject is.
lay'tel SIvten
