tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 18 11:50:06 1996

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Re: perpetual Today Is A *****

>Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 16:31:54 -0800
>From: Dennis Orosz <[email protected]>

>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.

I think you underestimate Will, who has been more stalwart than any in the
fight to preserve the Klingon character of Klingon.  Moreover, you
understate the importance of keeping the language as its own language, and
not deciding we can blithely mess with it to make it easier to express what
we want.  Following your logic, why should we even bother with the grammar
of Klingon at all?  If the whole point is to learn to speak forcefully and
with a warrior's heart, we can do that with English words and English
word-order and English grammar, just modifying our style.  Or maybe use
Klingon words and English idioms which everyone knows are totally basic and
transparent to any sentient creature (they aren't).  Trouble is, if you do
that, you don't have Klingon: you have English.  And we're not here to
study that.

Me intend, you I understand could accompanied by non-trouble-much this way
speakingly, and thuswise must English correct not am it?  Iffing the
emotion's across-getting, and meaning's the, thenning grammar-fixation is a
non-goodness.

But that's NOT English.  And it never was and it never will be.  If you're
here to study Klingon culture exclusively, I think you may be on the wrong
list.  If you're here to study the Klingon LANGUAGE, and along with that,
secondarily, how the language and the culture affect one another, then
that's something else.  This is primarioly a linguistics list, not a fan
group.  This is not to say that the culture should be ignored, but the
language is what's under discussion here.  We are not here to decide what
the language should be like given our individual perceptions of the
culture.  We are here to discuss what the language *IS* like, how that
conforms to various views of the culture, and on a good day how assorted
*known valid* forms in the language may be more or less preferable than one
another based on our views of the culture.

~mark

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