tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Feb 18 16:30:56 1996
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Re: KLBC:Questions
Lawrence M. Schoen wrote:
> 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.
Just to bring in an obvious example of why the original poster's
objection to punctuational redundancy is a little out of place, I'd like to
point out that the use of the question mark is redundant most of the time
we use it in *English*! Take the following sentences, for instance:
"Do you have the peanut butter?"
"When did the hard disk crash?"
"Is that correct?"
In all of these instances, word order informs the listener that the
utterance is a question without the need for a question mark. Without
the question mark, there is still no way that any of these would be
misread as a declarative statement.
We're just doing the same thing when we write <<'Iwchab Daghaj'a'?>> or
<<lugh'a'?>>; the situations are pretty closely analogous.
Jon Van Hoose
[email protected]