tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Apr 24 13:17:37 1995
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Perspectives on Klingon Communication
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Perspectives on Klingon Communication
- Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 16:14:10 -0500
ghItlh JoAnn Long:
>>>
Hello! My name is JoAnn Long, and I'm graduating from the
University of Idaho this semester in English (focus on
linguistics).
[...] would like any information on Klingon culture, ESPECIALLY
where it would cause communication breakdown. An example is the
fact that Klingons appear, from my study thus far, to put emphasis
on action rather than existence, as their lack of an existence
verb in the usual sense portrays. [...]
<<<
JoAnn, let me bring you up short on that. I believe that lots of
Terran languages don't have "an existence verb in the usual
sense", and that doesn't say anything about their cultures.
For example, Chinese doesn't have grammatical gender, and doesn't
even have separate pronouns for male and female people; yet
traditional Chinese culture (before the 20th century) was one of the
most oppressive-to-women of the world's great civilizations.
(Ironically, in this century -- though I think before the revolution
-- *written* Chinese, in emulation of European languages, has
introduced distinct male and female characters for the third-person
singular pronoun.) Come to think of it, Chinese has no "existence
verb": the sentence translatable as "There are trees in Beijing" can
equally well be translated as "Beijing has trees".
- tlhIngan veQbeq la'Hom marqem
Mark A. Mandel
Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : [email protected]