[934] in tlhIngan-Hol
belated responses
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu May 27 12:47:24 1993
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: mark <mark@dragonsys.COM>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Thu, 27 May 93 10:00:42 EST
Qanqorvo':
>>> yaymo' Seylu' "One is excited because of victory".
>>As with my treatment of qaSey, I see that as a possible reading,
>>but not one that follows clearly from our data.
> Why not?
I wrote that because I thought lu' required an object. In all of
TKD's examples of lu', the person that would be the subject if lu'
were absent is the object of the verb.
Daqawlu' someone/something remembers YOU
wIleghlu' smn/smth sees US
Soplu' smn/smth eats IT
Daqawlu' YOU are remembered [~= smn/smth remembers YOU]
wIleghlu' WE are seen [smn/smth sees US]
Soplu' IT is eaten [same sentence as above!]
Even the idiomatic tu'lu' fits this analysis:
naDev puqpu' tu'lu' there are children around here,
smn/smth finds CHILDREN here
While Sey, translated as "be excited" and with the explicit causative
parallel SeymoH for "excite", has no obvious interpretation for an
object. I suggested that the cause of the excitement could function
as an object, as in my suggestion for qaSey, but in your "yaymo'
Seylu'" the cause is marked explicitly with mo'.
But!... While composing this reply I decided to check in the Appendix,
and there, lo and behold, we find
quSDaQ ba' lu''a' Is this seat taken?
Correcting the obvious typos yields
quSDaq ba'lu''a' (lit.) in-(the-)chair does-smn/smth-sit?,
i.e., Is someone sitting in the chair?
quS is not the object, because it's marked with Daq. There's no other
possible implied object around in the context. So ba'lu' is used here
with no object, meaning simply "smn/smth sits"; and your suggestion
for "yaymo' Seylu'" stands unchallenged by me. Again, what little
data we have, even from TKD's own Appendix shows possibilities not
suggested by the text of TKD alone. What a tangle!
Qanqorvo' latlh:
>>From Nick Nicholas:
>>Having survived the Conversational Klingon tape ("Buy or Die" indeed!),
>>two offerings. First: the canonical sample of a language, artificial
>>or not, seems to have always been the Paternoster. Without getting
>>into any debate on religious bias, here's my rendition of it:
>Well, I'll flaunt my ignorance. What's a 'Paternoster'?
"Pater noster" is Latin for "our father", the beginning in the Latin
Bible of what's commonly called in English the Lord's Prayer. It may
be the canonical (was that a pun?) example for missionaries, who are
often the first non-natives to analyze a language, but the standard
comparison text for phonetics is a fable of Aesop's called "The north
wind and the sun". I'll see if I can find it and Klingonize it. --
Now, what would happen to a missionary to the Klingons? {{>:-3==
(bearded Klingon grinning toothily with fierce brow).
(A paternoster is also an old-fashioned kind of serial elevator,
with a vertical string of one-person cars. The connection
between the meanings is a string of rosary beads.)
- marqem
Mark A. Mandel
Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : mark@dragonsys.com
