tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Aug 14 05:57:45 1994

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Analysis of tlhIngan Hol (was: Archaizing...)



Guido#1, a.k.a. "Boy Wonder!" said:

    But what do y'all think of this idea. I don't know how else to go
    about archaizing tlhIngan Hol.

... and then Lawrence said:

    I do not like the notion of developing lots of voculary based on an
    unsupported theory of word order. The speculation is interesting in
    its own right, but taking it any further to me means you're not
    doing Klingon any more. Sorry, that's just my view on it.

Guido,

Lawrence is right in his caution that this can get out of bounds in one
step, but there may be some grounds for guesses clearly marked as
speculative. (Lawrence, could this perhaps be treated as the kind of
linguistic detective work that allows us to guess at words in
Proto-Indo-European?)

If that's the kind of project you had in mind, Guido, then here's a post
(trimmed and de-typoed) I sent last October. Pardon me for shouting for
just a moment: IT IS ENTIRELY SPECULATIVE AND WAS CERTAINLY OFF THE TOP
OF MY HEAD! I believe it is, however, the sort of pattern that might
allow you to experiment.

Let me add that, for me, it was the fact that -vay and -vI':

	*   both appear as if they might be suffixes
	*   both start with 'v'
	*   both are associated with "per"

that caught my attention. These, however:

	*   cha'DIch "second"
	    chaDvay "cycles per second"
	    (cha'D/chaD)

	*   if romanized {I} is mispronounced as English "long I", it
	    might come out Klingon {ay}

have to be considered coincidences, Freudian slips, or Okrandisms. :-)
	
Enjoy,
Geno

PS: I'm going to be away for a few days, so please be patient if this
discussion continues and I'm late for ducking fireballs...


------------------------------- cut here -------------------------------
Marnen, the Songbringer ([email protected]) said:

	:  chaDvay             hertz (frequency) (n)
	I think you mean >chaDvay'<. Unanalyzable.

Since I know how many of you *love* non-canon speculations... Am I
the only one who thinks this looks like vatlhvI'?

There was some speculation a while ago about -vI' as a generic
reciprocal marker, rather than just for vatlh + -vI' = percent.
Well, Hertz is a measurement of cycles *per* second. In a flight of
fancy, one might think -vI' for unit reciprocals, -vay for time
reciprocals.
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