tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jan 21 06:14:34 1995
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Re: law'/puS
>>canonical and so, we have to deal with it the same way we deal with
Okrand's
>>{Hub'eghrupHa'} and so forth.
>Did Okrand really say *that*? Where? When? I don't remember it. It
>breaks rules, too: -Ha' is supposed to precede all other suffixes. What
>gives with this???
>~mark
Oh, why, absolutely. This corruption was printed on the SP2 Sky Box Trading
Card, entitled SuvwI' taj. It is there in the second sentence: {not
Hub'eghrupHa' lo'wI'}. He also used {tuQmoHHa'} in "HolQeD" 2:4 pg.17.
Apparently he forgot his own rule.
There have been other obvious mistakes. Does anyone remember {jIHtaHbogh
naDev vISovbe'} in TKD pg.172? The point is that we can't accept everything
as true, honest, grammatical Klingon, and Okrand can only backfit to a point,
without continuously refering to "different Klingon dialects, slang," and so
forth.
That's one reason some people would like to get away from Okrand. That may be
a bit drastic. The important thing is to just use some good old-fashioned
common sense. Okrand called {-'e'} a topic marker, but uses it everywhere as
a focus marker, as ~mark pointed out indirectly for Legend, who's hovering
around somewhere just above the mailing list. So what are we to do? Use
common sense, and things will sort themselves out. {-'e'} probably should be
focus, if that's how it's used everywhere in the examples, despite that
Okrand named it topic.
We've seen what trouble people get themselves into when they read into TKD
too much: Proechel thinks {-laH} should be used to make verbs adjectival
because it is translated by Okrand as "able". I said that before, I know, but
it's a good example of what not to do.
Common sense, that's the ticket. Don't forget, unless you have none anyways.
Guido