tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Sep 08 11:27:16 1994

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Re: Cut off message

Hu'tegh! nuq ja' William H. Martin jay'?

=It looks like most of my response to Nick's post was cut off by
=my mailer. Just as well. I was in a rather unpleasant mood and
=I was somewhat disturbed by Nick's suggestions that we form a
=sort of revoution against Okrand and Krankor and take the
=language on as our own. I also didn't gain any respect for Nick
=for his unnecessary flame of Krankor, referring to his use of a
=dictionary instead of a linguistic text.

Well, I read my posting over, and it might not have been respectful, but
I don't think it was flaming either. It is fact that Krankor, to elucidate
grammatical points, tends to refer to desk dictionaries rather than
linguistics texts; and it is a fact that topicalisation is a subtle topic,
best illustrated outside English (indeed, some people would dispute that
"It is X that..." is a topicalisation as opposed to a focalisation). If 
anything is to be written up on topicalisation in HolQeD, these facts are
pertinent. Indeed, I think they're very pertinent to why phrases like
verengan'e' pu' vIngev have not been discussed before.

Now, I'll freely admit that there's an obvious implication here: "therefore
I'm better than Krankor". Which I may or may not think, but in any case,
*I* won't write up anything on this for HolQeD, because I don't have the
time to get involved in this kind of tussle; and I suggest, instead,
that if they so desire, Krankor and Holtej work on something together.

As I was made to realise a bit later, my criticism of Okrand was ill-based
on the currently available data, and I retract it. I think the claim  that
Okrand is a less expert Klingonist because he uses it less is obvious, but
the evidence I adduced didn't support it. But of course, this depends on
what you mean by 'expert Klingon'. If X uses 'ral' as an adverbial, we would
justly castigate them as being inexpert... unless it's Okrand using 'motlh'.
I don't want to be involved with that kind of a moving target when I do
Klingon. Hence my call to arms. (Okrand has said on occasions that he has
to be careful he abides by TKD; unfortunately, not as careful as the best
Klingonists here.)

As for my call to arms, it's an old one, and I believe a moot one: it's
already happened. Had it not happened, Klingon would not be being used. 

=I personally
=prefer consensus over flame wars, and I think that changes in
=the language can occur with everyone's consent, especially as
=we gain even limited access to Okrand.

I prefer getting on with it to consensus, and a December release for Hamlet
is too soon to wait for Okrand, and I think that, in most cases, the consensus
is there anyway. (otherwise, I'd be doing bad Klingon. Which I may well be
doing anyway, unless I get more fedback!) The whole point I was trying to 
make was that a flame war over interrogative comparitives is a waste of time, 
and my option 4 looked pretty good from where I was standing...

=He didn't list the possibility that someone might come up with
=a better idea altogether.
=jIH lugh law' SoH lugh puS qar'a'?

... well. Better perhaps, and I will give it some thought. But I don't really
think the name of the game is competition. I think there's room, at this
stage of the language, for all of the above to coexist. (Then again, I seem
to have a much more liberal view of what is appropriate for Klingon than many.)

In fact, I think what has happened here is rather simpler. In what I thought
a supreme sacrifice of my ego, I did not reject Guido's alternative, but
proclaimed that both should be accepted. I think I'm now letting my ego defend
*this* as opposed to qar'a'. qar'a' is not a perfect replacement, since it
is a loaded question; I suspect, though, that had someone seem me using
law''a' puS'a', and suggested something like law' puS' net Sov'a', I would
have accepted it without question. The avoidance strategy does actually
pay off at times.

I dunno; I'll work out something this weekend. Then I've gotta change all my
texts' wej -DI' and wej -taHvIS to -pa', following Mark. You see, normally
I'm much better behaved when people suggest to me grammatical changes... :)

-- 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Nick Nicholas. Linguistics, University of Melbourne.   [email protected]  
        [email protected]      [email protected]
        AND MOVING REAL SOON NOW TO: [email protected]

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