tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 18 16:29:14 1996

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De' vay'

>Nick Nicholas writes:
>>I think you've just dug your own grave. Locative is, if anything, a more
>>general notion than directional; if we don't assume he means just
>>'directional' here, but all locatives, stative and directional, then he may
>>well be licencing "quS vIba'" --- something for which we have no precedent
>>whatsoever. For directionals, at least, we have the precedent of ghoS.

and Alan Anderson replies:
>I'm with charghwI' here.  {ghoS} is explicitly presented as one of the
>"locative notion" verbs; others are readily apparent from their glosses.
>{DoH} already includes the "from" idea; saying {jorwI'vo' DoH} *might* be
>okay, but {jorwI' DoH} is certainly okay.  {'el} is "go in", with "in" as
>part of its definition.

Far be it from me to interject considering my reputation and former body
chemistry trouble, I follow Nick's argument with sympathy, but my agreement
therewith is primarily in spirit. In practice, the divergence is less
pronounced, especially as goes the volume of precedence that has been laid
out in the past couple years. Okrand still totally neglects to strike me as
a man that would have the energy to produce an air-tight conlang, all the
mysteries to which are lying in wait for us in such a limited amount of
data, if only we were intelligent enough to find them. When imagined from
his point of view, I could see how a guy aiming for a list of well over a
thousand words and having plowed over several deadlines could be compelled
to gloss words not according to a pattern of total logic and accuracy. Most
of the words' case structures are indeed quite well defined; however, there
was unquestionably no way to tell the intransitivity of {meQ} when TKD 2nd
ed. was first published. Instead it will have been more accurate to say that
by the latter half of 1996 we finally had enough data to indicate that {meQ}
is intransitive. And that works nicely with {meQmoH} when speaking of one's
NON-psychosis-induced burns. {HuS}, {ngoS}, and {tet} are still mysteries,
and I doubt Okrand could have ever meant to write the whole language into a
rigor-mortis'ed two-dimensional answer key for geeks.

If I remember correctly, {'oHDaq 'el} surfaces in Hamlet, and ~mark's
editing was pretty mild and quite conservative. Still, {'el} often takes
objects in canon, as we see from time to time, but there remain other
mysteries that we have not, to this date, been able to solve at all with
given data. I think the Hauptgrund is the significance we place on the case
structure of the English glosses, even with the overlapping glosses, e.g.
for ghoS. Do we have canon for Dech? I really don't know, but I gleamed that
the point was that the likelihood of Klingon and English having the same
case structure for any given synonymous pair of verbs was too low to make
any assumptions about it.

Still I can understand how Klingon might feel like an air-tight system. If I
came across "sortir" in my dog-earred Random House French dictionary, and
the glosses were "exit, leave, depart", an assumption that "sortir" was
transitive would screw me in the end, since "sortir" is intransitive, and in
fact uses the preposition "de". Je vais sortir de la maison, par exemple.
Since my dictionary isn't thorough enough specify extraneous fine points and
since there are no intransitive verbs in English that would faithfully
reveal the meaning of sortir, I have to have access to a sufficient amount
of French text to know how the verb works. The Klingon situation isn't that
much better, unfortunately, and some of us simply bear prudent suspicion on it.

I'm still frustrated by the acceptance of a lot of Okrandian Klingon as
giving us answers to our mysteries, when in the self-same sentence we find a
-Ha' stuck after -moH, an aspect suffix after the pronoun 'e', or some other
such deviance that might mark the usage of someone not quite totally
proficient with the language (as Okrand describes himself). All he had to do
was wave his hand to the validity of 'I', and there you had it. It reminds
me, perversely, of Monty Python's Brian, who tried endlessly to dissuade the
mob who was completely ennamored with believing he was the Messiah. "I'm NOT
the Messiah!" "Only the true Messiah denies his true divinity." "Alright, I
AM the Messiah!" "YAAAAAYY!!!!"

Btw, I was poking around last week and noticed that any future Beowulf
translation project will have to grapple with the problem of pre-Conquest
English meter. English, being Germanic, is stress-timed, while French, whose
traditional rhyming meter English later adopted, is syllable-timed. It takes
about the same amount of time to say "runway" as "running away" in fluent,
unaffected English. Beowulf has quasi-consistent alliterative half-lines.
This made me wonder whether Klingon was stress-timed or syllable-timed.
Turkish is the latter, and Klingon morphology is scarily close to Turkish's.
"eljIklerimizin" is morphologically identical to "ghopHomDu'majvaD". Since
most Klingonists speak English, and a lot have other Germanic languages as
first languages, there might be a tendency for us to push Klingon to
stress-timed patterns, albeit incorrectly. The real question is, for a
native speaker of Klingon, i.e., for Maltz, does it really take longer to
say {SajvaD vInob} than {Saj nob}? If Klingon timed stress, we could expect
most unstressed vowels to become schwas, something like {SajvD vnob}, as
stress-timed languages do, whereas French, etc., do not do so. This does not
feel right to me, so I would expect syllable-timed patterns for Klingon. At
any rate, Beowulf's translation will undoubtedly shed some light on Klingon
phonology, as Hamlet did to a degree.

So now I see that Klingon IS better suited to Shakespeare than English.


--ghuy'Do

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