tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 28 16:39:00 1993

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Re: Klingon "with", cases, etc.



Will Martin:
 >>    I have it from Marc Okrand personally that he did not model Klingon on
any single language. He has had people "knowingly" tell him that they were
sure it was based upon Arabic, several different Native American languages
(he did do his dissertation on nearly extinct South-Western Native American
languages, after all), Hebrew, and more.<<
>>The point is, he went waaaay out of his way to make Klingon as foreign
as possible. He would intentionally follow the norms of a language, then find
some other area to violate those norms, hence features like the differing
tongue positions for D and t, which in ANY natural language, tends to be in
one of those two positions, but not both. OVS word ordering was the one order
he could not find in any other language.<<


My remarks about Klingon and Mongolian were based on the word-structure only.
The claims for significant Arabic and Hebrew influence are ludicrous to anyone
who knows how semitic words, involving interdigitated roots and patterns, are
built.  The Klingon vocabulary is probably 99% invented (examples like the
Hol/Hel match could easily be coincidental) and the phonology is weird, even a
bit off the wall (see the excellent Weschler paper in HolQeD 1:1) by human
standards.

>>OVS word ordering was the one order
he could not find in any other language.<<

There are well-known claims of OVS languages in the Amazon basin (Hixkaryana,
Apalai, Bacairi, Makusi), but if such languages really do exist they are at
last very rare.

But looking just at the word structure (aka "morphotactics" or "morphosyntax"),
Klingon is a garden variety agglutinating language that no linguist would be
too surprised to find out in the field.   It happens to look a lot like
Mongolian.  It's even a bit boring.  (The portmanteau verbal prefixes are
rather unusual, and I have commented on this in my verb paper in HolQeD.)  Such
agglutinating languages are found all over the world, and they tend to do
things in semi-predictable ways.   In particular, they tend to use noun case
suffixes that are roughly equivalent to English prepositions--Okrand goes out
of his way to say that Klingon works like this (p. 27).

There are a lot of gaps in the available sketch of Klingon.  When speculating,
as we do,  about how Klingon might express concepts such as <accompaniment
(with)>, <absence (without)>, and  <instrumental (using/with)>, I believe that
any competent linguist would do what I have done: formulate some simple
questions for an informant to see if we can discover Comitative, Abessive and
Instrumental suffixes that would be parallel to the Ablative, Benefactive and
Dative-Locative suffixes already known to exist.  In other words, I am
hypothesizing that Klingon has Comitative, Abessive and Instrumental suffixes
that we don't know about yet, and I've formulated the questions (experiments)
that should allow the hypothesis to be tested.  While Okrand is answering
questions (He is, isn't he?), I have also suggested that we probe for Genitive
and Accusative suffixes; perhaps they are used somewhat optionally or
idiosyncratically as in Turkish and Mongolian.  In particular, an overt
Accusative marker might allow us to play occasionally with the word order for
dramatic or poetic effect.  These hypothesis may well be wrong, and that's OK;
but given what we already know about Klingon, and given what we know about the
human languages that look a lot like Klingon, it would be wise to test these
hypotheses.


>>differing
tongue positions for D and t, which in ANY natural language, tends to be in
one of those two positions, but not both.<<

It is not unusual to have a dental/alveolar point of articulation and a
retroflex point of articulation in the phonology for a single language,
especially in Australia but also in Indonesian and even in Northern Indian
languages.  However, Klingon phonology is remarkable for its lack of symmetry
(see the Weschler article again).  When a language has a dental or alveolar
point of articulation, it is likely to have a set of homorganic consonants,
e.g. t, d,  n and s.  When a language has a retroflex point of articulation, it
is likely to have a homorganic set such as T, D, N and S.   It would not be
surprising to find {t, d, n, s, T, D, N, S} in a single language, but the
Klingon inclusion of {t, D, n, S} and the lack of {T, d, N, s} is unusual for
its asymmetry.

Ken Beesley



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