[87197] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: The topic marker -'e'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Wed Nov 25 23:23:55 2009
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:21:58 -0800
From: "Christopher Doty" <suomichris@gmail.com>
To: "tlhingan-hol@kli.org" <tlhingan-hol@kli.org>
In-Reply-To: <4B0DFE24.9070305@trimboli.name>
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
There is clearly some agreement that what I said earlier is wrong. What I'm really looking for is how this agreement has been reached from the list of canon stuff that Voragh sent earlier. I can't see anything there that says nouns marked with -vaD can only have a certain interpretation.
This is another thing that I think can be hard for someone new to the list. I fully acknowledge that this agreement exists, I'm just not sure it's based in canon. Which I don't mean as a putdown or anything. One would expect a sketch of a language to start having new rules when people want to use it for a wide variety of tasks and topics.
I guess what I really want to know when I ask these sorts of questions is "have I violated a rule given by Okrand, or does what I said just seem wrong to people who are more experienced in the language than I am?" Both of these things are valuable to know, but so is knowing the difference between the two.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
David Trimboli wrote:
Christopher Doty wrote:
>> That says "The communications officer ignored, for Commander Kruge, an
>> urgent message." It's as if Kruge ordered the officer to ignore all
>> urgent messages, not as if the officer took it upon himself to ignore
>> any urgent messages specifically for Kruge.
>
> But why does it say this? I haven't seen anything anywhere which
> indicates that this interpretation is the only one possible. That is,
> I don't understand why you're saying that this interpretation is
> correct, and the other isn't.
>
> You might note that "The communications officer ignored an urgent
> message for Commander Kruge" is actually ambiguous in English: it
> could me that the messages was for Kruge and it was ignored, or that
> an urgent message was ignored at the behest of Kruge. I don't know
> why you're saying that this ambiguity isn't present in Klingon.
>
>> Qugh la'vaD QIn pav lI'lu'pu'bogh buSHa'pu' QumpIn
>> The communications officer ignored a message which was transmitted to
>> Commander Kruge.
>>
>> Here, {Qugh la'vaD} is tied to {lI'lu'pu'bogh}, not {QIn pav}, and not
>> {buSHa'pu'}. There are other verbs I could have used than {lI'}, but the
>> point is that it takes a bit of recasting to get the Klingon to mean
>> what we want it to mean.
>
> But again, I haven't seen anything that says this. Why is {Qugh
> la'vaD} tied to {lI'lu'pu'bogh} in this sentence, and why does that
> make it correct?
Frankly, I'm not sure how else to explain it. Maybe someone else can do
so where I have failed.
chaq SoHvaD pabvam QIjlaH latlh ghot. jIQongchoH DaH 'e' vIHech.
--
SuStel
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