tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 16 21:04:11 1996
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Re: KLBC:Questions
- From: "Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC:Questions
- Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 21:04:11 -0800
Robert E. Newcombe writes:
> When asking a question in tlhIngan, surely you should ommit the "?" at the
> end of the
> construction.
>
> Several writers on this list do use "?", whilst this can make the phrase
> easier to translate,
> I'd have thought that strictly the question mark was redundant !
I've seen this kind of remark too often in the past to let it go any more.
There is nothing wrong with redundancy in language. In fact, *all* languages
possess, to a greater or lesser extent, redundancy. And a good thing they do,
it allows us to decipher meaning when the signal is less than perfect.
More to the point (and this has been on my mind because I just gave an
assignment on this in my psycholinguistics class), one of the defining
properties (or as Hockett suggested, the *requirements*) of language is "smear."
"Smear" refers to spreading linguistic information across the utterance.
Morphological information, syntactic information, semantic information, and even
pragmatic information. You do this in English when you make sure that the
"person and number" of the verb agrees with the subject. You do it in romance
languages when you make sure the gender of nouns agree with their adjectives.
You do it in *all* languages.
Sure, having a question mark is redundant. But there's nothing wrong with
redundancy in language. Klingon would really be an alien tongue if it *didn't*
have it.
Of course, since we don't know anything about Klingon punctuation (like if there
even IS such a thing) this is all quite moot. Question marks are a convention
that we use (or not) with our romanizations.
Lawrence
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