tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 29 13:08:34 1996
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Re: Streets
>Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996 17:51:59 -0800
>From: [email protected] (Alan Anderson)
>peHruS writes:
>>In Chinese...Tao is pretty broad.
>It corresponds very closely with Latin "via" and English "way".
>>In conclusion, {He} works for me.
>Of course, Klingon is not Chinese (or Latin, or English). I expect that
>many of us would understand {He} if it were used to refer to a physical
>path or roadway, even if we hadn't had this discussion, but that's not a
>good argument that we should use it that way. The question ought to be:
>Would Maltz understand it? :-) I suspect that *because* so many natural
>[Terran] languages have a single word for a very broad concept of "way",
>Klingon does *not*.
I wouldn't go that far. It's a very fine line to walk. On the one hand,
it's tempting simply to say (as peHruS seems to like to do) "well, language
X does things this way, so Klingon does." Klingon is NOT Chinese, and it's
NOT Hebrew and it's NOT Welsh. Chinese and English may have verbs that go
both ways (tr and intr); that IN NO WAY implies that Klingon does (In fact,
based on the way Klingon seems to work, I'm inclined to believe it
doesn't). It's very important not to say simply "Well, My Favorite
Language behaves this way; it's obviously the only correct way for
Klingon."
On the other hand, we mustn't ignore the way other languages work, either.
I often quote other languages' way of doing things, not always (in fact,
rarely) as a source of inspiration for a suggestion as to how Klingon
should do something, but to *oppose* one: absent any evidence to the
contrary, we can't assume that Klingon behaves in manner X because we can't
think of anything else; on the contrary, I have here a language which does
NOT behave in manner X. This proves only that it's POSSIBLE for Klingon
to work like that language (and not like the proposal); not that it's
inevitable.
I don't buy that Klingon has to be be maximally different from existing
languages (if Okrand REALLY wanted an alien language, like nothing on
Earth, he'd have made one. Klingon isn't all that unique). Krankor may
disagree with me on this, but to me, the fact that languages do something
one way does not constitute support that Klingon doesn't. Nor necessarily
that it does.
~mark