tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 19 07:26:53 1996
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Re: Any philosophers out there?
- From: "Garrett Michael Hayes" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Any philosophers out there?
- Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 10:08:08 -0400
- Organization: Client/Server Labs
- Priority: normal
On 19 Jul 96 at 0:15, A.Appleyard wrote:
> Re "I think, therefore I am", beyond and below all the obscure
> philosophizing that is getting further and further from anything to
> do with Klingons: the ultimate truth is: it is time Okrand provided
> a Klingon word for "to exist".
Why? It seems to me that the absence of such a term focusses
tlhIngan Hol nicely into an active state rather than a passive
state.
It gets re-emphasized here on the list frequently that tlhIngan Hol
is *not* a code for English. Maybe we also need to say that neither
is it necessarily a method for expressing *HUMAN* thought.
Even among human langauges there are differences based on cultural
divergence or environmental variances. If I recall correctly, the
Eskimos have something like a hundred or more terms for various
forms of snow, while there are Polynesian languages with no such
terms at all and no easy way to express the *concept*.
I see no reason to assume that tlhIngan Hol should have ways of
handling all of the same ideas we handle in English or other human
languages. Finding ways to re-think what one is saying and looking
for other viewpoints is a large part of the attraction of studying
tlhIngan Hol (for me at any rate).
As far as the discussion of "I think, therefore I am" being
off-topic, I very much disagree. If you want to translate an idea
from expression in one language to expression in another, you need to
understand the original idea first. And if regular readers of this
list learn anything, it should be that "obvious" meanings are rarely
as obvious as we think.
'etlhqengwI'
(vuDmeywIjvaD jIngoy' jiH'e')