tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Dec 04 16:51:00 2011
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Noun cases
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At 11:52 04/12/2011, André Müller wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">That's not how linguistics works
nowadays. </blockquote><br>
vISov. qech vIQIj neH. The question was asked, "why would Klingon be
anything like Latin?" and I understood why the original poster had
made that reference, so I was just making it more explicit. <br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">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).
</blockquote><br>
Exactly. You're providing more examples for the same point. <br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">People who object to English
split infinitives are usually mutually exclusive to linguists, mind
you.</blockquote><br>
But you're not pretending they don't exist, are you? So you know
that the influence of that original Latin grammar persists to this day.
Linguists know a lot of things about language that most people don't. But
I find that linguists are so familiar with the way language really works
that they are sometimes surprisingly ignorant of what people without
linguistics training actually believe. I'm trying to remember the title
of a linguistics paper I saw that was amusingly parallel to
"Scientists discover hitting hand with hammer hurts."<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">So, what you describe here, are
not rules, but mere common patterns of description. </blockquote><br>
Did someone call them rules? Oh I guess I did, but only in the negative.
"Common patterns of description" is a much better description,
what I was getting at by mashing into boxes.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">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.</blockquote><br>
I have. And when someone who learned the basics of her first foreign
languages thirty years ago out of fifty year old textbooks meets Khmer,
the first thing she tries to do is to find SOME boxes to put the concepts
in, even if they are Klingon boxes. It's nice to have something to
attach new knowledge to.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">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</blockquote><br>
It's probably not that different from Russian with the tenses removed,
but I'm told that case usage is one of the best ways to mark a non-native
speaker of Russian. You grow up with it or you never quite get it right.
:-(<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""> [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? </blockquote><br>
It wasn't my thesis. I was just providing an explanation of the Latin
thing. I have been told that Marc went out of his way to make
Klingon as unexpected as possible in comparison to Earth norms, in many
ways. Translations of sample text in TKD makes it seem as though -pu' was
originally a tense marker, though. Or maybe Marc was never that hot at
languages with aspect, either.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Languages with aspect but no
tense aren't uncommon, see Chinese or Thai for example. And they're well
known, too.</blockquote><br>
I don't know them. Thanks to speaking a language with no tense and one
with no aspect I now make no attempt to learn either as a tourist, and
just throw in time stamps and a big smile.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">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"; eudora="autourl">
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".</blockquote><br>
Different question, but it would be interesting to see.<br><br>
-Qov<br><br>
P.S. I've just realized why I get two copies of a lot of list messages:
people when you're using reply all to get around the lousy new list
system, make sure [email protected] and the stoli address aren't both
in there.<br><br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Greetings,<br>
- André<br><br>
<br>
2011/12/4 Qov
<<a href="mailto:[email protected]";>[email protected]</a>><br>
<dl>
<dd>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>
<dd>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.<font color="#888888"><br><br>
<dd>- Qov</font><br><br>
<br>
<dd>At 16:07 28/11/2011, Noah Bogart wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">
<dd>Why would Klingon follow any sort of rules or models followed in
Latin?<br><br>
<dd>On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 7:03 PM, Lucifuge Rofocale
<<a href="mailto:[email protected]";>[email protected]</a>>
wrote:
<dl>
<dd>> > Do you think that Marc Okrand may have deliberately
designed the language to break the convention of
<dd>> > noun cases?<br>
<dd>> What convention?<br>
<dd>The convention that nouns have to have recognisable declensions,
following the model of Latin. </blockquote>
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