tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jun 08 09:33:03 1997
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RE: KLBC: meaning of first person in plural (maH)>
- From: "Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: KLBC: meaning of first person in plural (maH)>
- Date: Sun, 08 Jun 1997 12:44:21 -0400
- Organization: http://www.kli.org
[email protected] wrote:
>> In TKD, we are taught that the pronoun for "we" or "us" is "maH".
>>
>> But this can have two meanings (this distinction does exist in some Terran
>> languages) :
>> 1 - me and you (and possibly other persons with any of us),
>> 2 - me and the persons with me, but NOT you (nor any persons with you).
David Trimboli (in his glorious role as BG) notes:
> We have no rules set down addressing this, but it has come up before.
For thos interested in such things, there's a cute joke involving the
distinction between inclusive and exclusive first person plurals in Tolkien's
Elvish from the first book of Lord of the Rings. The Eldarin languages *do*
possess both forms, and when Frodo and his buddies meet some elves in the
woods, he shows off his booklearning by greeting them with a bit of their own
tongue with the phrase "a star shines on the hour of our meeting" (I'll leave
it as a class exercise to look up the Elvish in question). Unfortunately, in
the first edition of the LoTR Tolkien accidentally used the *exclusive* form,
so Frodo is really sort of snubbing the elves. "A star shines on the hour of
our meeting, me and my friends here, not you guys!"
Just a bit of constructed language trivia on this topic which I thought you
might enjoy.
Back to Klingon, since tlhIngan Hol does *not* seem to distinguish between the
inclusive and the exclusive there is ambiguity, and potential for the same kind
of language play that this feature allows in English and similar languages.
Lawrence
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