tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Mar 27 21:52:35 1994
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Re: More sun thoughts...
- From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: More sun thoughts...
- Date: Mon, 28 Mar 94 10:50:18 EST
On Mar 25, 11:04pm, [email protected] wrote:
...
> What about using verbs as nouns? This has been discussed
> before, and it is still pretty unclear; but if you can use
> the root form of the verb as a noun, then you should be
> able to use it in a compound. I don't think there is definite
> proof that it can't be done.
>
> Amy
I really don't like the idea of us taking this kind of license with the
vocabulary. You wind up making it a lot easier on the people who are
translating from English to Klingon, and making it a lot harder on the people
trying to translate from Klingon to English (or just plain understanding it
in Klingon).
If every verb could be used as a noun, then there would be little reason
to bother having two different parts of speech, now would there? After all,
there is no separate part of speech for an adjective, right? Its meaning just
varies depending on how you use it, and you even use different suffixes
depending on its use. So if all nouns were verbs and all verbs were nouns, we
could just have two parts of speech: noun/verbs and chuvmey. Not good.
Another thing is that you eliminate another difference between English
and Klingon, since in English, we like to turn verbs into nouns and then use
our favorite glue-verbs "to be", "go have", "to give" or such. "GIVE me your
answer." "When IS your vacation?" "I just HAD a really good jog next to the
river." Maybe Okrand's next language should have only four verbs and then we
can nominalize the rest of them. That would probably work well for Ferengi.
wejpuH.
charghwI'