tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 21 11:34:43 1998
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Re: pab mu'mey
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: pab mu'mey
- Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 14:34:33 -0400 (EDT)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> from "Steven Boozer" at Apr 21, 98 10:41:21 am
According to Steven Boozer:
>
> : <<chuvmey>> bolIjlaw'. Okrand tells us that Klingon linguists
> : consider there to be three kinds of words: nouns, verbs and
> : left-overs. He gave us words for all three. You want terms to
> : classify words into subtypes Klingon linguists apparently do
> : not consider.
> :
> : charghwI'
>
> We don't know that. If DIp, wot and chuvmey are sufficient, then pray tell
> me why they also use the terms lengwI', moHaq and *both* mojaq & mojaQ?
These are word fragments. {chuvmey} are words, as are {wot DIp
je}.
> (Are affixes considered chuvmey I wonder?)
No. Again, there is a difference between a word and a word
fragment.
> The fact that Maltz didn't
> happen to tell his Federation interrogators the words for "pronoun" and
> "adverbial" doesn't mean there aren't any, just that they didn't make it
> into the relatively small vocabulary of tlhIngan Hol words published in what
> Okrand repeatedly calls only a "sketch" of the grammar. I would be
> astonished if Klingon grammarians did not have specialized terms for the
> various chuvmey, not to mention other language-related phenomena. Until we
> learn what they are, I see nothing wrong in using our own words on this
> listserv in the interim, so long as we agree amongst ourselves.
This is the same argument that can be applied for any
hind-sight word we want to create. We are not here to build the
vocabulary beyond Okrand's contributions. We've argued this
point many times, and likely will continue to do so, but don't
expect to ever find these "new" words on KLI's "New Words"
list. This is explicitly not what the KLI and this mailing list
is about.
> We knew for a long time that Klingons had a musical form that translates as
> "opera" in Federation Standard, but it wasn't until KGT that we learned what
> they call it themselves. At which point, we dropped all the other coinings
> proposed by various Klingonists and started using ghe'naQ.
And as soon as Okrand publishes something that describes
pronouns, adverbials, question words and such, differentiating
them to a greater degree than {chuvmey} does, we'll have those
words, too. We won't until then. Be satisfied with *pronoun*,
*adverbial*, etc.
I see these attempts to describe a pronoun as replacing a noun
and realize that Klingon also uses them as verbs. I doubt you
can come up with a compound construction from the current
vocabulary that can describe the general functions of a pronoun
in Klingon. In English, pronouns replace nouns. In Klingon,
they replace nouns or they act as one form of the English verb
"to be", which has more functions in English than pronouns have
in Klingon.
The boundaries of grammatical function do not exist in the same
places between these langauges.
> Areas I'd like to know more about: Do Klingons "conjugate" verbs? We've
> observed there are two types of wot that behave differently: action and
> stative verbs, or what Okrand calls "qualities". How do Klingon grammarians
> distinguish the two? How many types of nouns are there? We can create
> subsets consisting of names (pong), ranks (patlh), etc., but do Klingons do
> this sort of classification?
It is unlikely that Okrand will ever go back through the entire
vocabulary and define which verbs are transitive, intransitive
or both. I wish he would, but over time he has shown himself
disinterested in that particular task. And changing prefixes is
not exactly what I'd call "conjugating" a verb. Conjugations in
most languages deal with the irregularities of the langauge
which must be memorized. Klingon lacks these irregularities of
form. This is one of the bits of evidence that it is an
artificially created langauge. It is a bit too neat in this
regard, but I don't mind. It is challenging enough to learn as
it is, and these irregularities would make it harder still.
As for different types of nouns, there is no grammatical
difference between the types you propose, so why should Klingon
linguists care?
> Maltz was, I believe, a science officer so his knowledge of grammatical
> terminology may be somewhat vague. We need to find a linguist or poet to
> interrogate. I wonder if Keedera is available?
Whatever.
> Voragh
charghwI'