[tlhIngan Hol] {ghIq} {ngugh} and time adverbs with time stamps

mayqel qunen'oS mihkoun at gmail.com
Fri Oct 29 05:19:08 PDT 2021


God saideth in the holy scripture of tkd:

-----words of god starteth-----

It was earlier thought that all adverbials (except {neH} <only>) come
at the beginning of the sentence. This is frequently the case, but
what is really going on is that the adverbial precedes the
object-verb-subject construction. It is possible for an element of
another type to precede the adverb. Most commonly, this is a time
element (a noun or phrase meaning <today, at six o'clock,> etc.).

{DaHjaj nom Soppu'} <Today they ate quickly>

-----words of god endeth-----

And perhaps because of this tkd quote, we place time stamps at the
beginning of the sentence, i.e. before any of the adverbs. But this
creates the "problem" of where to place an adverb which has a "time
stamp" flavor such as {ghIq}/{ngugh}. In the tkd example god used the
{nom}, and there's nothing "off" in saying "today they ate quickly",
or "today quickly they ate".

But what if we wanted to say "On Monday we acquired the ship, and then
on Tuesday the war started"?

The logical thing to write is {DaSjaj Duj wISuqpu', 'ej ghIq povjaj
taghpu' noH}; but this creates the problem of placing the adverb
before the time stamp.

Seemingly/apparently we need to write {DaSjaj Duj wISuqpu', 'ej povjaj
ghIq taghpu' noH}; but there's something ugly in hearing "and on
Tuesday, then the war started".

So there are two options..

Option A: Flush the words of god down the toilet, thus writing {ghIq
povjaj taghpu' noH}.

Option B: Placing a parenthetical time stamp in the following way:
{ghIq -povjaj- taghpu' noH}.

Of course someone can say that using the {ghIq} is redundant to begin
with, and there's no problem with just saying {DaSjaj Duj wISuqpu',
'ej povjaj taghpu' noH}.

But the problem (ok, *my* problem), isn't how to express the desired
meaning; it's rather finding out the order in which one should place
time stamps and "time adverbs" together.

--
Dana'an
https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/
Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ



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