tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Sep 05 13:47:28 1994

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Odd and End

Not odds and ends, for I'll be briefer than that.

I am horridly busy at the moment, and have time for only a few passing
observations.

The Trikal/Guido show was very amusing; his backdown, though ("I'm off to
do Hamlet") reminded of something critical, which I may have (or may not have,
but I have thought it) said in anger to Krankor, and which remains true.
If we debate whether form X is acceptable for every novelty outside the
Okrandian corpus, no Klingon will ever be written. If we innovate blindly,
guided only by English intuitions, you end up with Proechel usage. The point
of works like _Hamlet_ is that they need to find --- and establish --- a
middle road, following canon and Krankor where the answers are clear, and
innovating within accepted parameters where they aren't. They will establish
this middle road, and I believe they will displace both Krankor and Okrand as 
authorities (or at least undermine them), by presenting an established usage. 
This is why it is so important for people to comment on the usage in these 
works while they still can, before they're hard copy.

Questions that arise on the list are questions that I've already had to face
often in my work, and which I find Guido is now facing too. Some of them
haven't even been raised: where do you put the -'a' when making a law' ---
puS comparison a question? It was obvious to me that it goes after the law'
and puS; it was just as obvious to Guido that it goes after the verb embedded
before the law'.

I will keep my usage, and Guido will keep his. This is important, and I
want to stress this. There is no right answer, because there is no evidence
pointing one way or the other that I'm aware of (although a look at Amerindian
languages may prove instructive). So there are four possible outcomes:

* Someone arbitrarily proclaims that I'm right and G's wrong.
* Someone arbitrarily proclaims that G's right and I'm wrong.
* We realise that we can't tell which is right, and avoid the form altogether.
(Taken to its logical conclusion: we stop writing in Klingon entirely.)
* We allow individual variation to continue.

The first three alternatives are unacceptable in my view, and I will fight
against them as much as I can. Both G's answer and mine to the linguistic
problem at hand make sense; it ruins the nature of Klingon as a linguistic
challenge to start legislating, *when there is nothing in the canon to make
us lean one way or the other*. This is not the time to get bogged down in
discussion which will lead nowhere, and it is not the time for fetters. There
was a time for that, and Krankor has done a good job in managing and
summarising those debates. But now, I am confident that enough Klingonists
have consistent and reliable intuitions on what is acceptable Klingon, without
getting bogged down in minutia. And now we are mature enough to restore
Shakespeare to Klingon. Please participate in this venture, and please do
so with a sense of creativity and freedom, not narrow legalism. The alternative
is squabbling and politicking, under which nothing ever gets resolved ---
or done.

(In case anyone thinks I'm whining at some critic who's taken me to task:
I'm not. Both Guido and Mark have made substantial comments on my work, and
both of them have displayed exactly the kind of creativity and flexibility
I am arguing for. They --- and others --- should keep 'em coming, of course!)

One final point. There's been a lot of talk about whether ghaH is a verb
or a pronoun. The fact that there's controversy should have alerted you
to what I think is the only intelligent answer: it is neither. Rather, it
is what used to be a pronoun (otherwise, why couldn't you say tlhIngan jIghaH?)
becoming grammaticalised into a copula verb (otherwise, what's the verb
suffix doing there in jIHbe'?) It is a form in transition, just as rIntaH
is (otherwise, what would rIntaH be doing between the main verb and its
subject?)

What has happened to topic constructions in Klingon is also interesting.
I strongly suspect Okrand intended phrases like the following to be
grammatical:

verengan'e' pu' vIngev.
As for the Ferengi, I sold [him] the phaser.
It is the Ferengi that I sold the phaser to.

This is how topic constructions work in languages that have them: sentence
topics pick out an argument of the verb as what the sentence is about, and 
the rest of the sentence acts as a comment on it. This is reflected in
phrases like HaqwI''e' DaH yISam --- 'Doctor' is the topic; 'find now' is
the comment.

I suspect just as strongly that no Klingonist would find the Ferengi phrase 
above acceptable. I'm not arguing that they *should*; I just find it 
fascinating that, through a combination of Okrand's vague expression and
the lack of case-like topicalisation in English, what was supposed to be
a topicaliser has ended up as little more than an emphatic --- and as a
a result, people don't know why HaqwI''e' DaH yISam is structured the way
it is.

(Of course, Okrand makes it obvious he doesn't *use* the language as much as
we do, by using a monstrosity like jagh Dajeghpu'bogh HuH for "The bile of
the enemy you defeated" --- where jagh Dajeghpu'bogh and HuH are a N-N
compound. In Klingon, of course, this is ambiguous with "the bile that
defeated the enemy/the enemy that defeated the bile". And when I did my
statistics on relative clause usage earlier this year, I found only a
couple of instances where Klingonists used a structure like this. Through
usage, Klingonists know what is ambiguous and hard to understand, and avoid
it. Okrand isn't subject to these pressures. As a result, "verengan'e'
pu' vIngev" would probably make perfect sense to him --- to us, post-Guido,
it can only mean "I sell the phaser --- that Ferengi" (apposition). (And 
let's recall that apposition itself is a Krankorian innovation, with no canon
backing. So it's not as if the split between Okrand and the Klingonist
community on linguistic judgement is recent.)

I hope Krankor doesn't do a HolQeD expose on topicalisation; first, because
he'd have to get the definition of topicalisation from a linguistics textbook
rather than his dictionary, as he's done in the past with other linguistic
terminology :-) , and second, because I think the story of -'e' is, in a way, 
a small victory of the Klingonist community against the terseness of Okrand. 
We worked out what to do with -'e' after all, even if it wasn't what was 
intended. I see no good reason to put a stop to that.


There. That should increase list traffic some...

-- 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Nick Nicholas. Linguistics, University of Melbourne.   [email protected]  
        [email protected]      [email protected]
            AND MOVING SOON TO: [email protected]

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