[tlhIngan Hol] which of the two would you prefer ?

[SuStel]

On 1/20/2020 11:08 AM, jevreh at qeylis.net wrote:
> ghaHmo’ qatlh maHvaD maSeng
>
>> On Jan 20, 2020, at 08:45, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> "why do we cause for us trouble because of him ?"
>>
>> Which of the following two would you prefer ?
>>
>> {qatlh ghaHmo' maHvaD maSeng ?}
>> {qatlh maHvaD ghaHmo' maSeng ?}

My impression has always been that the relative positions of adverbials, 
question words, and syntactic nouns isn't strictly fixed. Syntactic noun 
phrases come "before the object noun," locative phrases (a kind of 
syntactic noun phrase) come "at the beginning of the sentence," and 
adverbials and the adverbially acting question words come "at the 
beginning of the sentence." The Addendum tells us that an adverbial 
"precedes the object-verb-noun construction," and that "an element of 
another type" can "precede the adverb," the most common element being a 
time element. Syntactic noun phrases are more common than time elements, 
so does this not apply to syntactic noun phrases?

Given all that, plus a somewhat scanty list of examples, makes any of 
these possible. We are given no information whatsoever as to whether 
Klingon has any preference of order for these elements. I personally 
tend to put adverbials before syntactic noun phrases, but I cite no 
evidence for this practice.

I would note that your English sentence, /Why do we cause for us trouble 
because of him,/ is not well-formed. I don't see any way to combine the 
prepositions /for us/ and /because of him/ and the question word /why./ 
This would have to be recast as something like /Why do we cause trouble 
because of what he did/ or /Why does his presence make us cause trouble?/

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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