[tlhIngan Hol] placement of adverb

[Will Martin]

[wrong button]

Okay, yes, this is “From the Grammarian’s Desk” which was a regular feature of HolQeD and was later reprinted as a collection, so it is both in HolQeD v1n2p4-5 and also in the separate publication entitled “From the Grammarian’s Desk". Citations should probably cite the original source, which was HolQeD.

It was not a canon example from Okrand, since this was June 1992 and we didn’t exactly have a lot of canon back then.

I think that in Krankor’s example he fully intended {chay’} to be a question word. “How do I own a great ship? Now you are beginning to understand that.”

He may have been stretching the grammar a bit to do this, since the {‘e’} is not really referring to the question so much as the ANSWER to the question. These were early days. I would not, now, present this as an example, and I’ll spare you how I would have translated it because you don’t care.

I think his argument was good, and he could have picked a clearer, less controversial example. I still applaud him for the degree of insight that he had, before most of us had heard of the language.

As iffy as this example may be, I don’t think Okrand improved things with his example that seems to have mistakenly put the adverb AFTER the {‘e’} instead of in front of it. There’s nothing in TKD that justifies THAT word order, but there it is. Canon. [Eye roll. Head slap. Head shake. Sigh.]

I don’t think that Okrand has ever explicitly spoken on the placement of an adverbial affecting the second verb of an SAO construction. I like Krankor’s approach better than Okrand’s, and in my remarkably limited writing in Klingon, I’ll probably follow Krankor’s placement because it seems to follow the rules of grammar in a more sensible way, and I simply don’t understand Okrand’s canon example at all.

I mean, we have several grammatical items that could appear before Direct Object. If {‘e’} precedes an adverbial, what about time stamps, Type 5 marked nouns, {-meH} clauses, etc.?

If Okrand really wants the {-‘e’} to precede the adverbial, then he’s got some ’splainin’ to do so we know how to form the second sentence of SAO when it is more complex than just a verb and a subject.

I really think the ball is in his court on this one.

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




> On Apr 13, 2023, at 11:01 AM, Lieven L. Litaer via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org> wrote:
> 
> Thanks to charghwI' for pointing at this. Now at last I know why I
> remembered this phrase, even though it's not canon.
> 
> To all those who do not have HolQeD: The article is found in the book
> "From the Grammarian's Desk", which is a collection of the HQ articles
> by HoD Qanqor.
> 
> Am 13.04.2023 um 15:14 schrieb De'vID via tlhIngan-Hol:
>> Was this Okrand's example?
> 
> I think it's not. All of the article seems to be from HoD Qanqor. He
> usually marks canon quotes clearly.
> > I believe he was asked about this (or a
>> similar) sentence and said that {chay'} is only a question word, and
>> doesn't act like a relative pronoun (meaning something like "the way in
>> which...").
> 
> I remember something like that too. In my understanding, it's not used
> like "I know how it happened." (Same also for qatlh)
> 
> 
> --
> Lieven L. Litaer
> aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"
> http://www.tlhInganHol.com
> http://klingon.wiki/En/HolQeD
> _______________________________________________
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