Yep. While you can look at the English sentence and then understand what the Klingon is supposed to mean, when you run it through actual Klingon grammar, it becomes mush.

Since the Head Noun of a Relative Clause has to be its subject or object, it can’t be the Locative, so one must assume that America is the Head Noun.

It comes out like “In Canada, there are bears of America, which is nearby.” The Head Noun has a role in both the Main Clause and the Relative Clause, so on one hand, America is nearby, and on the other hand, it has a Genitive relationship with the bears in a Noun Noun construction, and all this happens in Canada.

We have to stay this strict about the limits of a Relative Clause, because otherwise we open the gates to word salad, where you can pile together sentences that act like hash codes: You can go through a translation process from the English to the Klingon, but you can’t read the Klingon and figure out what it’s supposed to mean. It can’t support its own weight and collapses in splinters.

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




On Feb 1, 2022, at 8:02 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:

Suppose I want to say: "At Canada there are bears. Near Canada is
America". And I want to say all this in a single sentence. So I write:

qa'naDa'Daq Sumbogh 'amerI'qa' mIl'oDmey tu'lu'
at canada where america is near there are bears

Would this be correct? Or is this "the ship on which I fled" problem?

Perhaps, translating the {-bogh} as "where" seems weird, but in tkd it
says that "Relative clauses are translated into English as phrases
beginning with <who, which, where> and most commonly <that>"

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