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