[tlhIngan Hol] jIH Daq DopDaq

[Will Martin]

It’s also good to remember that in all of this, any time we add {-Daq} to a noun, we are talking about the location where something happens. We are not talking about the location of a noun independent of any verb, as a sentence fragment.

This goes back to the “cat in the hat” problem. Klingon doesn’t have a mechanism for using {-Daq} to refer to the location of a noun, except through the location referring to the action of a verb.

“The warrior in the tower aims his disruptor at the enemy on the sark.”

In English, “the warrior in the tower” is a meaningful sentence fragment; a chunk of grammar that is complete as a reference that you can understand without a verb. The same is true as “the enemy on the sark”. In Klingon, we could expand these into relative clauses, as “the warrior who stands in the tower” and “the enemy who is riding the sark”, but these are grammatically quite different from the original English phrases because they introduce verbs that were absent from the original, and when the {-Daq} is trying to apply itself to the object of the main verb, it becomes ambiguous because the locative would appear in the same location in the sentence whether it is intended to give the location of the relative clause or the main clause.

Ambiguity happens and it’s not an evil we always need to eliminate, but it does open potentials for being misunderstood, akin to the significance of the comma in, “Let’s eat, Grandma."

You’d have to keep in mind that the locatives refer to the locations of actions, not a direct reference to the locations of the nouns. I’d probably say it as:

qalqachvo’ SarghDaq jagh Qeq SuvwI’.

I’m not directly telling you where the enemy is or the warrior. I’m telling that the aiming occurs from the tower to the sark, and that the warrior is aiming at the enemy. It implies that the warrior is in the tower and the enemy is on the sark because of the location and direction the aiming happens.

This is why when you discuss anything like a fringe case of using {-Daq} it’s not really good to try to use sentence fragments only. You want to work with whole sentences so that you can fully understand the grammar of locatives in Klingon.

Your original question had to do with wanting to describe the location of a thing, not of an action involving the thing. That’s a somewhat alien concept within the grammatical framework of a Klingon sentence, outside of SuStel’s examples of {Hay} and {Dung} because these are nouns that act as relative descriptors of location which are valid as nouns that can be used as subjects or objects of a verb, in addition to being nouns that can instead have {-Daq} added to pin down the location that the action of a verb happened.

{Dung} is a noun that can be a subject or an object of a verb. {DungDaq} is a locative for the action of a verb. Attempts to use {DungDaq} as a subject or object would indeed be an edge case of grammar, probably without canon to back it up. It would, at the very least, be highly uncommon, though in poetry, all bets are off.

Twas brillig and the slithy toves...

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)



> On Mar 10, 2021, at 10:42 AM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 3/10/2021 9:07 AM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
>> SuStel:
>> > So far as we know, yes, only the nouns
>> > that give a relative location let you say
>> > pronoun noun.
>> 
>> Is the {Daq Dop} a noun giving a relative location? I'm asking to make certain I understand correctly what a relative location actually is.
> No, I'm referring to words like Hay area beyond and Dung area above that refer to locations in reference to some other location. Area beyond what? Area above what? When you think about the word Daq location, you don't necessarily think "location relative to what?"
> 
> You could say jIH Hay area beyond me or jIH Dung area above me, but not jIH Daq — that would have to be DaqwIj my location.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
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