tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Dec 29 09:57:23 1999
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Re: Verbs of Motion
ja' SuStel:
>Sometimes, Okrand's mistakes lead to more interesting bits. We winced when
>we heard {wa' tera'ngan je wa' romuluSngan} come out of Vixis' lips, but now
>we know that it's a common grammatical error perpetrated by Klingon youths
>to put the conjunction in the wrong place. Okrand realized his mistake
>(either on his own or through a Klingonist) and made it "correct."
Whoa! I don't know if it's your vision or your brain that's fogged, but
you've made a completely incorrect conclusion. He quite explicitly says
that it's a common *error*, that it is *not* correct. He didn't "fix" a
mistake made in the film (and in his notes). He labeled it as a mistake
that happens sometimes. It's a "canonical error" along the lines of the
{HaD}/{Hagh} mistake in TKD.
>When I see errors in Klingon, I don't automatically assume they were
>intentional. (For instance, I am not at all convinced that mislabeling
>{bachHa'} as a noun in KGT was intentional. I think it was an ironic
>coincidence. I could be wrong, of course. I also think that annotating it
>as a likely Okrand joke is akin to assuming that Okrand can do no wrong.)
You obviously missed the part where Okrand as much as admitted the joke.
Lawrence wrote:
>I was talking with Marc about this yesterday. I mentioned that the only
>problem with the {bachHa'} error in the book was that it was, by definition,
>canonical. I could hear him smiling over the phone as he said, "But that's
>only in the Klingon to English side. It's correct the other way."
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh