On 14 July 2016 at 17:44, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
On 7/14/2016 11:29 AM, De'vID wrote:
Just before that, it says "The grammatical construction is a bit aberrant". The way it's written, it suggests that the only problem is the missing {-taH}.
Yes, but put all those things I mentioned together and you have a highly suspect sentence.
Here's the whole passage: <More literally, this is "Dying while standing is preferable to living while kneeling." The grammatical construction is a bit aberrant; one would expect "{QamtaHvIS}" ("while continuing to stand") and "{tortaHvIS}" (while continuing to kneel"). In proverbs, however, grammatical shortcuts are not uncommon. Even the Federation Standard might be considered somewhat incomplete. One would expect "*It is* better to die on our feet than *to* live on our knees."> It reads to me like the Klingon sentence is no more aberrant than "Better to die on our feet than live on our knees" is in English. The grammar of the English proverb isn't constructive either, i.e., you couldn't just construct an arbitrary sentence of the form "Better to X than to Y" and not have it sound strange in most cases.
and the explanation in TKD that "Klingon verbs ending in Type 9 suffixes (other than -'a' interrogative and -wI' one who does, one which does) always occur in sentences with another verb,"
And here, that verb is {qaq}. Embedded within this comparative are the two implied sentences {Qam[taH]vIS qaq Hegh} and {tor[taH]vIS qaq yIn}.
But you said this suggested that QamvIS Hegh and torvIS yIn satisfied the noun phrase parts of the comparative, as if such phrases could stand alone as noun phrases. Besides this crazy proverb, there is no evidence that -vIS can do this.
What I'm suggesting is that {Hegh} and {yIn} satisfy the noun phrases, while {Qam[taH]vIS} and {tor[taH]vIS} are subordinate clauses in which the other verb is {qaq}. I'm not suggesting anyone construct sentences of this form, only that it's analysable using grammar in TKD. Perhaps such sentences were grammatically kosher in the past, but are no longer, and such constructions are found only in fixed proverbs. -- De'vID