tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Dec 20 08:09:03 1996

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Re: DaH vay' vIlarghlaH

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>Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 17:36:10 -0800
>From: Steven Boozer <[email protected]>
>
>On Tue, 17 Dec 1996, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>:>From: "William H. Martin":
>:>
>:>"You smell like a targh."
>:>jaSHa' He' SoH targh je.
>:
>:It would have to be "SuHe' SoH targh je" wouldn't it?  If Klingon pronouns
>:were so different from English that "thou" + "other" didn't equal
>:"you-plural", Okrand would have said.
>
>Would he? TKD is only a sketch of the grammar after all (TKD 2, p. 18).
>This sounds like a good question for Maltz as it may not be predictable:
>Does SoH + "other" = tlhIH or chaH in Klingon? If I'm speaking to you and
>substitute your name {{;) for the pronoun that refers to you, we get:
>    "Seqram smells like a targ."
>    jaSHa' He' Seqram targh je.
>I searched the canon (of course!) and couldn't find a good example either
>way. Can you think of one?
>
>How do "extended" pronouns work in other Terran languages?  What do the
>German and Portuguese editions of TKD say?  Has anyone on the list actually
>seen either of these?  Do we know how involved Okrand was in their
>translation? 

In most (but NOT all) Terran languages I've studied, pronouns work roughly
the same way: "I" plus "you" and/or "other" equals "we", and "you" plus
"other" equals "you plural".  Only multiple "other"s are "they."  (think
about it in English).  Notably, Cherokee has special different pronouns for
all these cases, in singular dual and plural.  But English, other
Indo-European languages, and quite a few non-IE languages all work more or
less the same, with "you" + "other" = "you-plural".

Aha, you will say that Klingon is not Indo-European, nor a Terran
language.  And you'd be right: I wouldn't accept "well, IE languages do it,
so Klingon must" as an argument either.  However, note that TKD is written
in English, and for an English-speaking audience.  While it's true that
Okrand might have neglected to mention some of its non-IE quirks here and
there, or failed to give all its details, the pronoun-structure is a pretty
basic concept, and I would have expected him to tell us if they didn't add
up the usual way.  If "you-plural" does not equal "you-singular" plus
others, well, what IS it then?  It's unlikely he'd have left this out if it
didn't do what he could have expected us to guess at.  True, some aspects
of the pronoun structure ARE left unexplained, with nothing really to go on
(e.g. what pronoun do you use to refer to a group composed of both
language-using and non-language-using object?  As in "The woman ran into
the house.  They both burned"?  This has been mentioned here before.  I am
of the opinion that they cannot be mixed in a single pronoun, and you must
say "juHDaq yIt be'.  meQ ghaH 'oH je."  Note, however, that this question
does not affect verb-conjugations, so it isn't as important an omission: we
can get by without knowing the "right" answer and be pretty sure we're not
breaking any rules), but it's still possible to carry on without them.
It's pretty plain that the meaning of "you-plural" means "you and others"
(if I'm addressing the leader of a group, not all of whom are present, I
doubt anyone will dispute that I can say "SuyoH" to compliment the whole
group).  If it didn't, we could reasonably have expected to hear about it.

~mark

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