tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 17 16:28:40 1996
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Re: perpetual Today Is A *****
On Wed, 17 Jan 1996, William H. Martin wrote:
>
> Today is a good day (itself an odd concept; I mean what is it
> about the duration of 24 hours that can "be" "good"?) whose
> purpose is that somebody dies? What is the INTENT of this
> statement? What meaning is at the root? What feeling does the
> speaker have such that they are driven to say this thing?
>
> I strongly believe that the statement was SUPPOSED to mean,
> "I'm willing and ready to die honorably, here and now." So if
> that is what you mean, why rattle on about the intangible
> qualities of a 24 hour time span?
>
> charghwI'
>
I think you've been debateing the nuances of the grammer so damn long
your losing touch with the language...the soul of a warrior is the soul
of a romantic, a poet, to such a person the expression "Today is a good
day to Die" makes perfect sense, and if its ungrammatical so much the
better! This fixation on perfect grammer is unhealthy. Go sample any
native speakers of any language and the majority do not speak
grammaticly, they speak a living language that changes everyday and grows
and shows emotion and expresses beauty without a nit picking concern for
the rules some body somewhere set down for the correctness of the grammer.
Yes we should study the grammer and yes we should try and speak
correctly, no one wants to speak a language so badly as to give offense.
But we ought not to be so hung up on every slight digression that we
loose the ability to communicate with the non linguists around us. Go
tie Okrand to a chair and make him disgorge the rest of the the
information he has if necessary, but grow the language and learn to speak
it as it ought be spoken...Klingon is a "living language". The language of
warriors who belong to an expanding empire. It should contain
corruptions and adoptions and it certainly ought not to be spoken as if we
were all literati rather then real people. While I can carry on a
technical conversation and write a mean paper on occasion, when I wanted to
exhort my fire team into staying alive Grammer was the least of my concerns.
And the "average" Klingon is one hell of a lot more concerned with survival
then he/she is with grammer.
I'm sorry to have been on this soapbox so long but you can't divorce the
language from its speakers and expect it to make sense and this labratory
atmosphere of stative verbs and glottial stops; sigh. Seems to me to
completely lose the Klingon from Klingon.
Dennis