[tlhIngan Hol] Reversing the order of {-vo'}

SuStel sustel at trimboli.name
Thu Aug 10 09:25:23 PDT 2017


On 8/10/2017 11:52 AM, mayqel qunenoS wrote:
> This thread is slowly turning into a nightmare..

That's because everyone is trying to engage in Socratic dialogues, and 
multi-threaded email lists don't lend themselves to that.


> There is a sentence, which we are trying to translate; this sentence
> is "he returns from the great hall at the Federation command centre on
> Earth".
>
> But the problem is, there is obviously some confusion with regards to
> what actually its trying to say. Does it mean : "he returns (wherever
> it is he is returning) from the great hall (which is) at the
> Federation command centre on Earth", or "he returns from the great
> hall (at Kronos) to the Federation command centre on Earth" ?

There is no /to/ in the sentence to be analyzed. /He returns from the 
great hall at the Federation command center on Earth/ means, in English, 
that there is a great hall, the great hall is at the Federation command 
center, and the center is on Earth. It cannot mean that you're going 
from a great hall on Kronos to a command center on Earth. /At/ does not 
mean the same thing as /to/ (or /of/).

If you want to talk about going from a great hall on Kronos to the 
command center on Earth, which is NOT what was asked for, then I'd say 
that as:

    *[Qo'noS] vaS'a'vo' tera' DIvI' ra'ghom qachDaq chegh*

I added the *Qo'noS* to make it explicit that we're talking about a 
great hall on Kronos. Lemme add some punctuation to make it clear which 
phrases are independent here:

    *[Qo'noS] vaS'a'vo', tera' DIvI' ra'ghom qachDaq, chegh*

There is no noun-noun relationship between the first two phrases. They 
are completely independent of each other. The only thing they have in 
common is that they both act as syntactic noun phrases to the main 
sentence, *chegh.*

*
*
> What I'm trying to understand (and the more this thread continues, the
> "trying" becomes "struggling"), is why -as De'vID wrote- "the pattern
> is {X-vo' Y-Daq chegh} and not {Y-Daq X-vo' chegh}".

I don't know anything about there being a REASON it can only work that 
way. What I know is what Voragh has already pointed out: we have many 
canonical examples of *X-vo' Y-Daq OVS* and none of *Y-Daq X-vo' OVS.* 
The answer to your question is "that's just the way it is."

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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