On 2/27/2020 8:42 AM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
SuStel:
qama' neH qIppu'bogh yaS'e' the officer who hit only the prisoner qama' qIppu'bogh neH yaS'e' the officer who merely hit the prisoner qama' qIppu'bogh yaS'e' neH only the officer who hit the prisoner
ok, I understand these examples, thanks.. But there's still something which confuses me.
Suppose we wrote:
{qama''e' qIppu'bogh neH yaS}
The first translation which comes to mind, is "the prisoner who has been merely hit by the officer". But could it be translated too as "only the prisoner who has been hit by the officer" ?
The reason I'm confused is because I can't stop wondering:
If a construction as {verb-bogh noun} *can* be used as the first "noun" of a noun-noun construction, then why couldn't we have in the place of a second noun, just the {neH} acting with the meaning of "only" ?
This can't be a noun-noun construction because the head noun of the relative clause has a type 5 suffix on it, and the first part of a noun-noun construction can't have a type 5 suffix on it. So let's remove that suffix. It's not necessary. Let's say context makes it clear that *qama'* is the head noun of the relative clause. *qama' qIppu'bogh neH yaS* How would this be interpreted? Let's rebuild this so we can see its constituent parts. As a noun-noun construction, the head noun is *yaS.* So we start with the basic idea: *yaS*/officer/ Next, we add the head noun of the relative clause to form the noun-noun construction: *qama' yaS*/prisoner officer/ Maybe this is an officer in charge of prisoners. Not a very good noun-noun construction, but okay. Now we add the relative clause, remembering that *yaS* is NOT part of the clause: *[qama' qIppu'bogh] yaS*/prisoner-whom-he/she/it-hit officer/ This is an officer of the type /prisoner-whom-he/she/it-hit/. I have no idea what that means. Adding the *neH* doesn't help: *[qama' qIppu'bogh] neH yaS*/only-prisoner-whom-he/she/it-hit officer/ No clue what this means. None at all. Clearly, trying to analyze this as a noun-noun construction doesn't make any sense. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name