tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 29 14:58:50 1996

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Re: KLBC: compounding

Andrew 'Ska' Netherton writes:
>        OK, I've now been wondering about compounding things; not just
>nouns and nouns, but with verbs as well, to form multi-noun-multi-verb
>words/phrases.  Is there any restriction on this?  Otherwise I can see
>that it would be easy for 5 people to come up with 5 different ways to say
>the same English thought.

TKD section 3.2.1 describes compound nouns as combinations of two or
three nouns in a row.  TKD section 3.4 further defines combinations
of two or more nouns, says how to combine them legally, and explains
how to interpret the resulting combinations.

Nowhere do we see a description of compound verbs or noun-verb compounds
in any of the books, audio recordings, data transmissions, or interview
transcripts from Marc Okrand.  I interpret this as a definite restriction
on creating such compounds:  we can't do it.  Some of the vocabulary we
have hints that the compounds might be legal, but there's no way we know
of to make them, and no explanation of how to interpret them.  Unless we
are told of an as yet unknown grammatical rule that permits a general
combination of a noun and a verb into a new word, they're not legal.

The way *I* would describe a complex thought is simply to *describe* it,
in a complete sentence, using the vocabulary and grammatical tools at my
disposal.  There's not always going to be a simple mapping between words
of any two languages.  Captain Krankor, the Grammarian of the Klingon
Language Institute, recently took the readers of HolQeD on a remarkable
journey through a translation of a story.  He provided a tale written in
tlhIngan Hol and challenged people to submit English translations.  Many
phrases of his story were translated quite differently in each submitted
translation, though all of them adequately conveyed the original idea.

Yes, it indeed is easy for different people to come up with different
ways of expressing the same thought -- and that's a *good* thing!

-- ghunchu'wI'

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