[tlhIngan Hol] Fw: Re: Beginner questions - SAO, SAS and pronouns

Luis Chaparro Caballero luis.chaparro at web.de
Tue Sep 29 12:42:54 PDT 2020


Ok... I'm having problems with the plain text. I'm really sorry. My last try. Just ignore my last two posts.

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Thanks to you all for your patience and excellent answers! I have now a much better understanding of SAOs and pronouns.
 
SuStel:
> There is no evidence that a Klingon pronoun used explicitly, without marking or stress, indicates some kind of importance. *yaS vIlegh* and *yaS vIlegh jIH* are semantically identical.

Ok!
 
>> But is there no difference even if someone makes a longer pause when speaking? Something like in English: "I want to eat something and then I will read" and "I want to eat something. And then I will read".
> I would understand that as someone adding an afterthought after a pause. You don't say or write that way intentionally (unless you're affecting an afterthought).

I think in Spanish a pause could mean an afterthought but it could also mean, depending on intonation, that I want to give the second sentence a special place in the conversation. Anyway, I got the idea, thanks!
 
> You should think of sentence-as-object constructions as if they were single ideas. A Klingon who says *paq Daje'pu' 'e' vISov* isn't saying two separate things; it's just one idea. Consider the sentence *romuluSngan HoHpu' tlhIngan 'e' vIleghbe'*/I didn't see the Klingon kill the Romulan./ The idea here isn't that the Klingon killed the Romulan AND that I saw it. We don't know if the Klingon actually killed the Romulan; all we know is that I didn't see any such act. It's one idea.
 
That's a really good example. Actually I did see SAOs this way, but the sentences with period confused me. The pronoun *'e'* prevent us to see the previous sentence as an "assertion", we understand this sentence is meant to be the object of the second verb. In a "similar" way, when we read
"that you bought the book","that" is giving us the information that this sentence relies on another verb. I'm not trying to say that this idea fits Klingon grammar or even it's the correct way to explain it, it's just a way that helps me understand 
the right use of SAOs.
 
Will Martin:
 
> In other words, you are not punctuating it for a Klingon. You are punctuating it for an alien race of people trying to communicate in the Klingon language. That’s why it’s not important to put a period between the two sentences in SAO. You’ll find that it’s actually quite uncommon to do so among writers here.

Got it! And thank you (and the others) for the interesting explanation of the Discovery sentence!



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