tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 23 07:22:55 1999
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Re: *Egypt* Hol navmey
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: *Egypt* Hol navmey
- Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 10:22:26 EST
jIjatlh:
>I suspect they probably have at least commas and periods, but I doubt the
>existence of colons. We don't use them a whole lot in English. I suspect it
>also lacks the semicolon, the dash, the ellipsis, and the apostrophe. They
>may have parentheses and quotation marks. As for end punctuation, they may
>have the same mark to be equivalent to the period, the question mark, and
the
>exclamation point. Of course, all of this is pure speculation.
jang mark:
>Whatever punctuations they do (or do not) have, it's unlikely they match up
>well with the ones we know from English in any sensible way. Hell, even
>periods and commas and colons and dashes are used differently among various
>Terran languages which share them (consider German, English, French,
>Russian... all use them in subtly and not-so-subtly different ways). Would
>they have no punctuation to introduce a list? Well, why wouldn't they have
>one? Would it be the same as our colon? Not necessarily, maybe it would
>be also used in other contexts where our colon isn't. You can guess at
>some possibilities; things like syntactic breaks of various
>strengths... think of them as varying strengths of comma, semicolon, and
>period. Not necessarily equivalent, mind, nor even the same in number.
>Maybe they punctuate between sentences in SAO construction, using the same
>as they use at the ends of sentences; maybe it's a special one for that
>usage. Or maybe nothing, as the {'e'} (or {net}) serves to flag the
>sentence-join.
>
>Yes, it's all speculation. It's just as likely they use nothing, or
>something even stranger. Just that trying to say "they have period but not
>comma" is not a meaningful way to look at it. You'd do better describing
>the *functions* of the putative punctuations you're considering.
I was referring to the *English* uses of those punctuations.
Period - separates sentences
Question mark - ends questions
Exclamation point - ends exclamations
Comma - separates independent clauses
separates introductory elements
Semicolon - separates independent clauses within a sentence
Apostrophe - contractions and possession
Ellipsis - indicates omitted material
Dash - indicates break or interruption
Quotation mark - sets of speech (I use << >> when I write Klingon)
You get the idea.
>...I dunno, what we use dash for is probably pretty useful in Klingon; it's
>underused in English.
chaq.
>Apostrophe has specialized uses in English; we
>haven't seen such in Klingon. But maybe there are (even separating verb
>prefixes from verbs!). Apostrophes have wildly varying uses even in
>Latin-alphabeted Terran languages: English uses it for possessives and
>contractions, but contractions are a lot more common and formal and even
>obligatory in French and Welsh and Gaelic. Breton actually has two letters
>in the alphabet that are written "ch" and "c'h" respectively. Some
>romanizations use apostrophe to mean ejectives, as the IPA does, or
>aspiration.
Once again, I am referring to the *English* use of an apostrophe. In
romanized Klingon, the apostrophe is a glottal stop, but that's not what I'm
talking about. I'm talking about an equivalent to the English apostrophe,
which indicates omission of letters (or numbers) or possessives. But we
already know how Klingon forms possessives, and we already know that they
don't use punctuation when omitting letters, as in {Qu'vatlh} to {va}.
>But let's face it, punctuation makes life a lot easier for us as students
>of the language. So don't be ashamed of doing it.
jItuHbe'bej.
- DujHoD