tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 11 08:47:28 1996
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Re: jInajpu'
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>Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 08:32:56 -0700
>From: [email protected] (Steve Wolfson)
>I'm new to learning Klingon, and am enjoying it both from a fan and
>through my academic background in linguistics.
>Since I'm new this may have been discussed but how does esperanto
>add new words into the vocabularly. Is there a model there that might
>be useful.
Not as such. Esperanto is unabashedly an a postiori language, with its
grammar and vocabulary derived from existing languages. So it's not
uncommon for new roots to make their way into it from common Latin or
Germanic roots (since those are the roots of most of the rest of
Esperanto's word-stock), and even occasionally from other sources. But
Klingon is an a priori language; where will you introduce new roots from?
Just make up ones that sound good? That's a fine way to spoil a language,
since everyone will make up a different set.
Esperanto also has more word-forming rules baked into its grammar than
Klingon has. It's heavily agglutinizing, with gobs of affixes,
part-of-speech converters, etc etc. It's within the stated grammar of
Esperanto to convert a verb into a participial adverb or a noun into an
adjective or to add suffixes that carry meanings like "place characterized
by X" or "container of X" and so on and so forth. Klingon's grammar (at
least that of it which we're told about) is less productive and more
restrictive. We can't play such games with the wordstock without inventing
the grammar as we go along, and we'd rather not do that.
>-- Steve
~mark
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