tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Dec 04 11:53:16 2011
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Noun cases
<div dir="ltr">That's not how linguistics works nowadays. Maybe back in the 50s that was common, but certainly not in the last decades. I still know some old grammars and descriptions of "exotic" languages being described like "The [common Latinide concept A] is expressed as XYZ." or "The superlative is expressed by this-and-that means." (which in reality the language simply doesn't have a superlative). People who object to English split infinitives are usually mutually exclusive to linguists, mind you.<br>
<br>So, what you describe here, are not rules, but mere common patterns of description. These got more and more independent of old school grammars for European languages like Latin and Greek. Try reading a modern grammar for a non-Indo-European language.<br>
<br>From today's (and also 1984's) viewpoint of linguistics, Klingon is indeed quite a bit exotic, but not because the grammatical cases are somehow different from Latin (I still fail to see the exoticness of the Klingon case [or let's say type 5 noun-suffix] system), but because some features are typologically rare or uncommon on the planet (like OVS standard word order or that N-N constructions are head-final while N-Adj constructions are head-initial) or because some features usually don't occur together. Or would you call the fact that Klingon has an aspect system instead of a tense system a "deliberate" method to defy "future attempts to put Klingon in those boxes", too? Languages with aspect but no tense aren't uncommon, see Chinese or Thai for example. And they're well known, too.<br>
<br><br>One could actually get some kind of measure of the grammatical exoticness of Klingon or at least an overview. Compare for instance the distribution of features in the natural languages (WALS) of the world with the features Klingon has (CALS):<br>
<a href="http://wals.info/";>http://wals.info/</a><br><a href="http://cals.conlang.org/language/klingon";>http://cals.conlang.org/language/klingon</a><br><br>That could give a more objective view on how much Klingon differs from natural languages and "the rules".<br>
<br>Greetings,<br>- André<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2011/12/4 Qov <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:[email protected]";>[email protected]</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div>
All kinds of languages with little or no Latin ancestry have been harshly
mashed into that mould because someone sometime around the 13th century
wrote a Latin grammar that became THE standard for not only all
subsequent Latin grammars but all grammars of all languages compiled ever
after. It's the reason people object to English split infinitives, for
example.<br><br>
So Klingon wouldn't follow such rules but a linguist compiling a language
could easily have deliberately defied future attempts to put Klingon in
those boxes.<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br><br>
- Qov</font></span><div><div class="h5"><br><br>
At 16:07 28/11/2011, Noah Bogart wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Why would Klingon follow any
sort of rules or models followed in Latin?<br><br>
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 7:03 PM, Lucifuge Rofocale
<<a href="mailto:[email protected]"; target="_blank">[email protected]</a>>
wrote:<br>
<dl>
<dd>> > Do you think that Marc Okrand may have deliberately
designed the language to break the convention of <br>
</dd><dd>> > noun cases?<br><br>
</dd><dd>> What convention?<br><br>
</dd><dd>The convention that nouns have to have recognisable declensions,
following the model of Latin.
</dd></dl></blockquote></div></div></div>
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