tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon May 05 09:26:10 2014

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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Canon for answering negative questions

DloraH ([email protected]) [Hol po'wI']

> I'm trying to wrap my head around why anyone thinks this is ambiguous
> *in Klingon*. (I agree that such questions are ambiguous *in English*,
> but I don't see why the answer wouldn't follow the logical parity of
> the question in Klingon.)

I personally do not dispute your logical analysis of what the answers should be, but the problem is
we don't know much about the Klingon culture.  What we see on TV are mostly politicians and military
officers.  I believe that a lot of what we hear about the Klingon culture involves a lot of
stereotyping.  Obviously not everyone in the very large Klingon empire is going to fit into the
political marketing stereotypes being put out by the Kronos Ministry of Tourism.


> DloraH:
> > I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in the 
> > US, we encounter too many people that
> > slaughter the language, speaking with double negatives, say 
> > things like "I can't see nothing." (I
> > encountered this one just yesterday.)  Such a person that 
> > does speak like that could certainly give
> > a different answer than someone who is a computer 
> > programmer with a hobby in linguistics.
> 
> But how much weight would I want to give to such a person's
> understanding of grammar?

Obviously not much, but you still might have to communicate with such a person.  When you stop to
ask someone, "How do I get to the Great Hall?", you don't know what their level of understanding of
grammar is (or their ancestral influence from another language).


> -- 
> De'vID


-- DloraH


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