[87228] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: The topic marker -'e'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Thu Nov 26 23:18:44 2009
In-Reply-To: <f60fe000911261819v52de5098o71fac00e2479abc8@mail.gmail.com>
From: Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:15:45 -0800
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
I'm not sure exactly what I meant there (I blame the relatives again),
but I think it was this.
The difference between "a for him knife" and "a knife for him" in
English is that the first one is ungrammatical: "for him" can't be an
adjective. We see the same thing in Klingon (from my perspective):
<ghaHvaD taj> is fine ("a knife for him"), but <taj ghaHvaD> is bad: a
noun with -vaD can't go after a noun to modify it, as a verb of
quality/quantity could. You have to put it before the noun. But,
it's also expressly not part of a noun-noun construction.
I dunno, I am full of food and feel like we're at a dead end here. I
still just don't see how <ghaHvaD taj> and the like is a problem, and
I haven't seen anything here that convinces me otherwise.
Do you think <ghaHvaD taj 'oH> is bad as well?
On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 18:19, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com> wrote:
> Indeed. How can it be read any other way but "for him" modifying
> "knife"? Certainly that's how you'd diagram the phrase in English: an
> adjectival prepositional phrase modifying "knife". (With some context
> it could be adverbial instead, modifying something else...)
>
> On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 9:14 PM, David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name> wrote:
>> Christopher Doty wrote:
>>> It's not, e.g., 'a for-him knife', it's 'a knife for him.'
>>
>> What's the difference?
>>
>> --
>> SuStel
>> tlhIngan Hol MUSH
>> http://trimboli.name/mush
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>
>
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>
