[tlhIngan Hol] chaHDaq Hopbogh Daq tu'lu'

[Will Martin]

I, for one, strongly prefer SuStel’s first suggestion, or {SoptaH Hopbogh *pig* ghom tIn} or the like. The point is, you want to use deixis as an element of the grammar of the sentence. You don’t want to wave flags and shoot flares and play rock and roll at space launch volume levels, screaming, “DEIXIS, DEIXIS, HERE IT IS!”

mayqel’s original idea simply turns the deixis into an abstract and dances around it so much that it becomes too easy to see it as a separate concept and forget what it is supposed to be describing. It’s like, “Stuff happened at this one place, and there’s another place that is placed far, far away from this other place, so this second place is the place where this other thing took place.”

Yes, I’m exaggerating, but I’m doing so to show what it feels like trying to read mayqel’s Klingon example. SuStel fixes it nicely, and as he suggests, other approaches would also work.

The better technique is to use more than one sentence, construct context in one sentence for those that follow it, and use deixis to link the two location contexts by the concept of distance, without so much reliance on repetition of {-Daq} or {Daq}.

You don’t have to say, “At the place X happened, there’s another place that is distant. Y happened at the second place.” You can just say, “X happened. At a place that is distant, Y happened.” Simple is better.

Sometimes attempts to spell out every element of meaning instead distracts from meaning. (...as I’ve probably done in this post.) [sigh]

Sent from my iPad

> On Jun 15, 2019, at 3:57 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
>> On 6/15/2019 3:17 PM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
>> The english translation of the greek orthodox goes "now, there was a herd of many pigs feeding at some distance from them".
> SoptaH pig ghom tIn. Hop.
> 
> or
> 
> Daq HopDaq SoptaH pig ghom tIn.
> 
> The from them comes from the fact that you were just talking about them, so anything that is far is far from them.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name
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