[tlhIngan Hol] placement of adverb

[Will Martin]

Ahh. The rare advantage of being ancient…

I have HolQeD v1n2.

There, From the Grammarian’s Desk (by Captain Krankor, it says [and I’m adding curly brackets around the Klingon text — he used bold font, and I omit so this won’t be rejected for being too long]:

***
Greetings from the Empire…

…This issue’s column will focus on the adverbials and the mystical, magical pronoun {‘e’}. Consider the following English sentence: “I never saw the captain hit the officer.” How would you render this in Klingon?

The first attempt might well be this:

{not yaS qIppu’ HoD ‘e’ vIlegh}

However, this would be very liable to be interpreted as “I saw the captain never hit the officer: — not quite the same thing. It seems that we want to somehow get that {not} adverbial together with the {legh} verb. Yet we know that, for the most part, adverbials are supposed to go at the beginning of sentences, aren’t they?

… The correct translation is:

{yaS qIppu’ HoD not ‘e’ vIlegh}

… In describing the {‘e’} sentence construction, the dictionary has this to say:

“Klingon has two special pronouns, {‘e’} and {net}, which refer to the previous sentence as a whole. …They are always treated as the object of the verb. …What is a single sentence in English is often /two/ sentences in Klingon.

… one can fall into the pit of starting to think of that little {‘e’} as a kind of conjunction, but remember, it is not: It is a pronoun, the object of the verb, and the sentences that use this construction are not sentences at all, they are /pairs/ of sentences.
***

His other example in the article is {chay’ veSDuj’a’ vIghajlaH DaH ‘e’ boyajchoH}. “Now you are all beginning to understand how I am able to own a great warship."

He also suggests that it’s okay (as we later learned from the script of a later movie) to use the {‘e’} to refer to something that was just said by a different person.

****
Crewman: {vavwI’ ghaH ‘aj’e’}  "The admiral is my father”

Captain: {‘e’ vISovbe’} “I didn’t know that"
****

I’m happy to transcribe or scan or whatever the entire HolQeD v1n2 if someone has the tech suggestion as to how to get around text length limits on the mailing list.

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




> On Apr 13, 2023, at 8:07 AM, Lieven L. Litaer via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org> wrote:
> ...That is indeed an interesting thing to research.
> 
> I don't have v1n2, but I checked v2n1 and v2n2: It does not have
> anything regarding the above topic.
> 
> Also, I doubt that the above phrase is a canon example, because we have
> a quite complete corpus of canon phrases today. The search at Klingonska
> (and also Google) does not give any response for that phrase.
> 
> It's difficult to search for that quickly. If it's a typo, it could be
> anything.
> 
> --
> Lieven L. Litaer
> aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"
> http://www.tlhInganHol.com
> http://klingon.wiki/En/HolQeD
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org

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