tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon May 01 07:06:31 1995
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A couple of odds and ends
- From: [email protected] (Nick "Minoan Genius" Nicholas)
- Subject: A couple of odds and ends
- Date: Mon, 1 May 1995 23:40:51 +1000 (EST)
Apologies for not surfacing lately; I've finally been getting some thesis
work done (you may be bored by my thesis proposal document on my homepage).
One comment which has come up recently --- the ambiguity of "wej". In case
this hasn't been already said (it's hard keeping up with these things),
there is a way of disambiguating wej --- and I think I actually used it
in _Much Ado_: HoD'e' wej vIlegh (the numeral wej doesn't make any sense
there.)
On the 'e' jeS stuff, I must agree with Mark, even thought Westphal may have
argued his point overconfidently. One of the great merits of Klingon for me
is where its speakers do things you wouldn't expect from English, and the
broader usage of 'e' has been one of these. Another has been the great
avoidance of -ghach; and even though I (unsurprisingly! :-) ) have
disagreements with Glen Proechel on some of the other points he made recently
in his post here, I agree with him on -ghach, at least as far as the
inappropriateness of Krankor's plea for a stronger -ghach is concerned.
We *can* make do with -ghach; and Klingon is all the more rewarding for
us because we do. The last thing we want is Okrand watering down the language
in response to all this, especially when David Barron provided a more than
adequate response to Krankor's challenge.
I was overjoyed when... drat I forget who it was, yoDtargh? proposed -ta'ghach
for single actions, as opposed to protracted events. -pu'ghach and -ta'ghach
are such obvious counterarguments to Krankor's complaints that the current
status of -ghach allows only continuous events (-taHghach), that I'm surprised
noone mentioned it earlier. Un-kudos for not clicking on to the aspects, folks.
As for the business of the Klingon comparative being a feature borrowed
off human languages, I started that rumour: I heard in a lecture given by
Bernd Heine that such comparatives are prevalent in the Americas, though
more frequently as "me big, you small" than "me much big, you little big".
Hixkaryana (our sister languages in OVS-hood) follows the former pattern,
I believe. No surprise that the pattern turns up also elsewhere, as Ivan
pointed out. In fact, many other Klingon features turn up from somewhere-
or-other --- nothing much in Klingon was created ex nihilo; rather, it's
the eclectic combination of the stuff that makes it somewhat odd
linguistically...
jIQuchqu', naDev jupwI' ngo''e', *'Iwvan*'e' vIleghmo'. ghaytan boSovbe',
'a qaStaHvIS DIS 1991 (qar'a'), *lojban* De'wI' QonoSDaq Hochma' --- jIH,
*Seqram* je, *'Iwvan* je lutu'lu'. DaH matay'qa'; 'ej bong qaSbe', DaH
*Doctorate* QulDaj rInchoHmoHmo' *'Iwvan*. yIvuv, vajpu'; qoHpu' cherghQo'
ghotvam!
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Nick Nicholas. The Nonce and Future Linguist. University of Melbourne.
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] s#[email protected]
<http://www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/Dept/Linguistics/nsn/nick.html>
"Henry Squirrel was thirsty. He walked over to the river bank where his good
friend Bill Bird was sitting. Henry slipped and fell in the river. Gravity
drowned." --- TALE-SPIN Story Generator, James Meehan, Yale AI Lab, 1975.