tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 25 19:53:20 2001
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"arbitrary" grammatical rules
ja'pu' SarrIS:
>This is a fine example of Okrand violating his most frustrating rule as he
>puts {-ta'} on {wuq}, the second verb of a Sentence As Object. We are told
>in TKD that we are not supposed to do this. I hope we can consider this to
>be an outdated rule, since Okrand has broken it a number of times, and he
>has told us that usage is the key to understanding the language.
ja' De'vID:
>chutvam meq yIDel.
>What was the reason for the rule?
There are a number of grammatical rules that seem to be there for no good
reason. A surprisingly large fraction of them are related to the single
phrase uttered by Kruge in Star Trek III after his gunner destroys the USS
Grissom:
qama'pu' jonta' neH!
The original script calls for the meaning "I told you, engine only!" By
the time it received a subtitle, it had been changed to "I wanted
prisoners!"
The re-purposing of this phrase is the genesis of several Klingon
grammatical concepts:
* separate plurals for people and things
* presentation of aspect instead of tense
* clipped Klingon (explaining the usage in ST:TMP)
* dropping {'e'} in SAO when {neH} is the second verb
* forbidding aspect suffixes on the second verb of SAO
It also led indirectly to the existence of two words for "officer" and the
odd homophony between "engine" and "capture" words.
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh