[86821] in tlhIngan-Hol
RE: Yet another newbie!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Terrence Donnelly)
Wed Nov 11 16:44:47 2009
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:42:28 -0800 (PST)
From: Terrence Donnelly <terrence.donnelly@sbcglobal.net>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
In-Reply-To: <C305E6BD33E2654DAE1F8F403247B6A6011382A88251@EVS02.ad.uchicago.edu>
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
--- On Wed, 11/11/09, Steven Boozer <sboozer@uchicago.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> bIQ'a'Daq 'oHtaH 'etlh'e'
> >> The sword is in the ocean. KGT
>
> ter'eS:
> > But not with negatives? ?{bIQ'a'Daq 'oHbe' 'etlh'e'}
>
> That's an interesting question. AFAIK we don't have
> any examples of {PRONOUNtaHbe'} or {PRONOUNbe'taH} in the
> corpus, whether referring to location or not.
>
I actually like plain {'oHbe'} by analogy with {'oH} used in a question (eg. {nuqDaq 'oH}). In the question, you don't know if something has continued existence somewhere, so you don't presume that, only ask if it exists. In the positive answer, you are stressing its presumed continued existence in a given place. In the negative, you are focusing on the fact that something is not somewhere; stressing its on-going not-being seems redundant.
-- ter'eS
