tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 03 12:15:54 1999
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Re: taghwI'pu', may' yItIv!
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: taghwI'pu', may' yItIv!
- Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 15:13:59 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
- Priority: NORMAL
On Tue, 3 Aug 1999 06:38:27 -0400 Carleton Copeland
<[email protected]> wrote:
> jatlh Qel:
>
> > and yes pagh, your right, some languages are harder, like
> > klingon (thats one i have troubles with).
>
> jang pagh. jatlh:
>
> > Actually, Klingon is a lot less complex than most natural
> > languages, with very few exceptions to the rules. The reason
> > it's difficult is that it is very different from English.
>
>
> Klingon is a minimalist language, if you ask me. Was Okrand experimenting
> to see how much linguistic baggage he could do without?
It is hard to say all the things Okrand was or was not thinking.
I do know that he was on an impressively tight schedule, going
from scratch to TKD in a matter of months with only the few
lines in the first movie and the director's note "And in his
gutteral Klingon, Kruge said..." to go by, he made stuff up. He
intentionally made things weird (OVS, comparatives, no explicit
"to be" verb, adjectival concepts carried by verbs, weird
combinations of phonemes [t, D], prepositional concepts handled
by a combination of noun suffixes and specialized nouns,
adverbial concepts handled by a combination of a few chuvmey and
some verb suffixes, etc.) and relatively simple.
The simplicity fit a culture of people who don't waste their
breath saying unnecessary things and made it possible for him to
have a functional language up and running in a short time.
The really impressive thing is not the simplicity. It is the
expressive range of the language given the simplicity. In all
the years of its existance, Okrand has not really expanded the
grammar since TKD. He has clarified some things and moved a few
boundaries around among things already discussed in TKD, but the
grammar pretty much is now what it was then. Within the time
constraints he had with the stylistic link to an absurdly
masculine culture, he came up with an amazing system of
communication.
> Just think how
> much grief we're spared by not having to deal with articles, gender, tense,
> declensions, conjugations, irregular verbs, a subjunctive mood, etc.
Of course, he could have kept coming up with new, weird things
like the comparative; which has nothign to do with the rest of
the grammar.
> Klingon has no verb "to be", no adjectives (per se), only a handful of
> adverbs... As I see it, all a taghwI' (like me) really has to conquer,
> beyond the brute memorization of vocabulary, is the system of
> prefixes/suffixes, word order, and a few extra hurdles like complex
> sentences and comparatives/superlatives.
Is that all? Well, let me introduce you to the concept of
recasting... The point is that it is different enough that
translation to and from it is a real translation process and not
just an encoding process. You have to choose different
grammatical tools to convey the same thought.
Give me your answer! HIjang!
Which phaser do you want? pu'HIch yIwIv!
Which woman is your sister? be'nI' yI'ngu'!
I hit the target with my disruptor. DoS vIqIpmeH nISwI'wIj vIlo'.
We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.
nucharghta' luneHtaHbogh chaH DISopchu'mo' maQuchqu'.
All the grammar and vocabulary you've talked about would not
necessarily help you figure out how to translate these examples.
> Not that it's easy going--the
> lack of familiar tools is a challenge in itself--but if you think of it
> this way, the task ahead may not seem so daunting.
If nothing else, you should be encouraged that an impressive
number of people without linguistic background have managed to
gain a useful degree of skill using the language.
> taghwI'pu', may' yItIv, ves loDnI'pu'lI' DatlhejtaHvIS!
>
> qa'ral
charghwI' 'utlh