tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 19 05:03:30 1997
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RE: some tidbits qororvo'
- From: "Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: some tidbits qororvo'
- Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 08:02:06 -0800
qoror wrote:
> 'a vIplaHbe'bogh tIqDu' ghaj SuvwI'pu'ma'!
> Our boys have hearts that know no fear!
>
> Some of you probably noticed that there was something ungrammatical in
> the first verse, and you're right. There's no word "vIp." I was using
> a verb suffix as a verb, because there's no word for "to be afraid" or
> "fear." But hey, these are soldiers! (I don't think they'd stick to
> grammaticality.)
Mark Shoulson has already pointed out the verb <<Haj>> so I'll take up the other
issue, your implication that soldiers need not adhere to the rules of their
language's grammar.
For most native speakers of a language, the vast majority of the rules that apply
to their language (and I'm speaking of descriptive grammars here, not
prescriptive ones) are unconscious. The classic illustration of this is
Chomsky's famous sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" which is
perfectly grammatical (though semantically bizarre) and another sentence with all
of the same words "ideas colorless furiously green sleep" but would immediately
be rejected by a native English speaker as ungrammatical.
My point being, if you're suggesting that soldiers (or most any subset of
society) consciously and of their own volition deliberately violate grammatical
rules I'm more than a bit inclined to disagree. Sure, slang terms which violate
grammar do develop, but they are exceptions which prove the rule, not license to
generate more exceptions.
In this particular instance there's more at work than just grammar though. We're
told explicitly that Klingons are very touchy about the uses of the suffix
<<-vIp>>, that there are taboos associated with it. Now you might argue that
this is actually support for a special use of it, since it is already a marked
suffix, and you could make a legitimate case for suggesting that. But in the
absence of any such evidence, the more conservative approach (i.e., don't commit
yourself one way or the other) would seem the better way to go here.
Especially when we *do* have a verb that could do the trick.
Lawrence
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