[tlhIngan Hol] Can I go around the SAO, this way ?

De'vID de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com
Tue Jun 28 05:22:27 PDT 2016


On Tue, 28 Jun 2016, 12:03 mayqel qunenoS, <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, let me ask a trick question : Do you accept exclamations with no
> overt subject ? For example :
>
> teH ! wa'Hu' Ha'DIbaH vISopta'.
> it is true ! yesterday I ate an animal.
>

Those are two perfectly legal Klingon sentences.

Now, that you accepted the "exclamations with no overt subject", the
> second question comes : Could I write the previous sentence as such ?
>
> teH, wa'Hu' Ha'DIbaH vISopta'.
> it is true, yesterday I ate an animal.
>

You're just joining two sentences with a comma. But how we write Klingon in
Latin script is just a convention, and has nothing to do with how Klingon
is written "natively".

Do you accept this sentence ? If yes, then allow me to observe, that
> we no longer have an "exclamation with no overt subject" ; instead we
> have the sentence {teH} "it is true", which is followed by another
> sentence {wa'Hu' Ha'DIbaH vISopta'} "yesterday I ate an animal". And
> one could analyze this sentence as
>
> "what is true ?"
> "It is true that yesterday I ate an animal"
>

The implicit subject of the first sentence is {ngoDvam} or some such.

So, if we accept the previous analysis, we finally come to the point
> of this mail :
>
> Consider this sentence :
>
> HarDI' chaH mob chaH
> when they believe they are alone
>
> If someone showed me this a few days ago, I would only translate it as
> "when their believing takes place, they are alone".
>
> But can I use this sentence in order to express the meaning too "when
> they believe (that) they are alone" ?


No. And what's the relation with your previous example? Here, the second
sentence is apparently the object of the first. They're not alike.

Why is the {mob chaH} necessary
> to be considered as the outcome of the {HarDI' chaH} ? Why couldn't
> someone analyze this sentence as :
>
> "as soon as they believe what ?"
> "(that) they are alone"
>

Because that's not how Klingon grammar works?

-- 
De'vID

>
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