tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 15 10:21:32 1997

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Re: SopDaq



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>Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 13:04:30 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Alan Anderson <[email protected]>
>
>Kenneth Traft wrote:

>>...Why When there two syllable words
>>that "don't" seem to make sense together doesn't mean that words put together
>>that make sense should be "understood" in that context.
>
>It's ironic that this sentence uses the phrase "make sense" twice.  I don't
>understand it, and I'm sure that if I try harder I'll merely MISunderstand
>what you're saying, but I'll give it a go:

Hrm.  I couldn't parse this either.  Looks like a word is missing, or two
many negatives or something.  Which is too bad, since I think it was what
we really needed to see.

>>QongDaq makes sense
>>as a sleeping place.  The words Qong and Daq are known and the

>I fail to understand why you think {QongDaq} is a "logical derivative" of
>a verb and a noun.  I actually see the logic, but it's based on entirely
>too much *assumed* evidence.
>
>"If we assume that {Qong} is a noun..."
>"If we assume that {-Daq} is a nominalizer..."
>"If we assume that general verb-noun compounds are legal..."
>"If we assume that words that don't appear to make sense really do..."

There's also the problem of "makes sense."  What makes sense to me doesn't
necessarily make sense to you, and more importantly what makes sense to a
speaker of one language doesn't necessarily make sense to another.  It
"makes sense" to an English speaker to say "He told me he was buying the
tickets," but to a speaker of another language it "makes" more "sense" to
say "He told me he is buying the tickets."  It "makes sense" to me to say
"the book is on the floor," but to my wife it "makes sense" to say it is
"in the floor."  It "makes sense" to say "by and large," but not "from and
little" or "with and purple."  Who are we to say what "makes sense" in
Klingon?  I wouldn't trust evidence from a single word; I've already
demonstrated that other languages near and dear to our hearts have oddities
that don't generalize, even with two or three or four "exceptional"
examples.

~mark

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