tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Apr 30 11:09:18 2012
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Question regarding purpose clauses
The beauty of this particular sentence isn't really the issue, though; I don't think there's much doubt that there are both better and worse alternatives. The question really is: Is this evidence of a new grammatical tool that we can employ when trying to express ourselves?
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From: lojmIt tI'wI'nuv [[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2012 19:37
To: tlhIngan-Hol discussion forum
Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Question regarding purpose clauses
I don't think of the world in terms of "right" and "wrong". I see some sentences as better and others as worse. Why deal in black and white when the world not only has shades of grey, but COLORS?
I don't care whether the sentence is right or wrong. I care about whether or not it could be improved. It's quite possible to make a lot of ugly, valid sentences that confuse as much as they communicate. My goal is to come up with something that expresses an idea clearly, and with that motive, the idea of stretching grammatical constructions out to their obscure, opaque extremes is not interesting.
Klingon is at its best when it is simple, straight-forward, efficient and nuanced. A lot of valid Klingon sentences can be none of these things.
pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv
On Apr 30, 2012, at 11:47 AM, Felix Malmenbeck wrote:
Some of the worst canon in existence is in movies because of the editing process.
Quite true, though I think ST:V is for the most part an exception to this rule (at least when it comes to . Still, it's certainly the case that with the way movies are made, it's difficult to say which lines are well thought through and which ones aren't.
And then there's {taH pagh taHbe'}. No thought went into that at all. He's on the set
with a handful of prepared translated lines from MacBeth and other very
Klingon-culturally-interesting scenes in Shakespeare, and the director turned to him
and said, "Gimme 'To be or not to be.'" The actors were ready. The cameras were
ready. Okrand knew he had a problem he didn't have time to solve well, so he
improvised.
Slightly worse, even: He did apparently put some thought into <yIn pagh yInbe'>, but when he told that to Christopher Plummer, he thought it sounded too tame and asked him to come up with something else.
It is challenging to fathom how "we hit it" is the purpose of "it is difficult". Unless this
is an unexplained idiom, it's a piss poor excuse for a sentence conveying meaning.
Better would have been {Qatlh'a' wIqIpmeH Qu'?}. That would be hard to misinterpret.
Difficult to fathom if one is convinced that the main clause of a {P-meH M} construction must the means by which P is achieved, yes. Thus, there are really three conclusions, the first two of which I give the most credence:
1. -meH has a wider range of use than TKD puts on.
2. This sentence is wrong.
3. It's some weird exception to the rules.
... but then people are saying these things, and people say poorly expressed things
all the time. The characters in question were back-woods Klingons with self-esteem
issues. There is no indication they were particularly well educated or that they spoke
particularly standard Klingon. They are not Klingon language instructors. They are
guys, bored, perhaps a little stupid, and aimlessly wandering around space looking
for trouble. Do you really want to learn to talk like they do?
Kind of, yeah. In fact, Klaa and Vixis are probably the only on-screen Klingons that I'd like to talk like; their performance is probably the only redeeming factor of that movie :P
I probably understand how to say things in Klingon better than Okrand. That doesn't
mean that I have any intentions of taking his authority away from him. He created the
language. I have enormous respect for him for that. That respect won't stop me from
rolling my eyes when I see what he does with the language from time to time.
Indeed, there's certainly no reason one can't do both: Marc readily admits that there are many who are more fluent than he.
I guess the make/break factor here really is how weird one thinks it would be if sentences like {wIqIpmeH Qatlh'a'} could mean something like "Difficult to hit?":
Many seem to think that it's in line with what we know about -meH.
I think it's a deviation from most of what we know about -meH, and lean towards the conclusion that -meH has a wider range of uses than we would otherwise have expected.
You seem to agree that it's a deviation from most of what we know about -meH, but instead lean towards the conclusion that sentences like this are wrong.
Either I missed something or the more complete transcript was not included.
'Twas, but it wasn't all in one place:
http://klingonska.org/canon/search/?file=1998-01-18b-news.txt&get=source
Basically, the original poster asks if {qaSuchmeH jIpaSqu'} is an okay way to say "I was too late to visit you". Marc responds that it means something more like that the visit did or will take place (though later, perhaps, than desired), and provides suggestions on how to say what the original poster wanted to say.
There are definitely exceptions to the generality I'm about to make, but someone
other than me once noted that Klingonists tended to fall into three groups:
Guess I'm somewhere between groups 2 and 3: I'm an engineer, not a linguist, but I do enjoy discussing grammar ad nauseam.
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