tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 15 10:10:59 2000
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Re: Grammar Highlight Each Day (bo-)
- From: Marc Ruehlaender <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Grammar Highlight Each Day (bo-)
- Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 12:10:40 CST
> I'd like more feedback on this. The Grammar Highlights are intended to
> overcome the obstacles of TKD. Thus, I am using terminology which is
> familiar in textbooks of common languages. However, I am willing to stick to
>
> TKD standard terminology only if people who are finding the Grammar
> Highlights useful want me to.
>
(aside: personally, I think a lower frequency would be better,
like maybe once or twice a week)
I think "suffix" is not such a difficult word that it must be
discarded in favor of "particle", esp. as "particle" denotes
a seperate word and thus is completely misleading when used
to refer to a "suffix". Would you use a comparable strategy to
refer to "prefixes" as "particles", you could be sure to lead
people to the (wrong) assumption said "prefixes"/"particles"
constitute "pronouns". Which in turn opens the door to vast
misunderstandings of Klingon sentence structure. While referring
to -be' as a "particle" does not seem to be so devastating, I
can see people with a antive language having negation particles
(e.g. Japanese "ka", Mandarin "ma", Turkish "mu" etc.) to just
utter a sentence and adding the syllable be' at the end, believing
they just negated the previous sentence. We don't want this to
happen. There is no way you can avoid all the traps a new learner
of Klingon might stumble into, and despite your declaration,
your grammar highlights look more suited to the beginner than
to the advanced learner, but you can try to keep the risk as
low as possible. (And I should not write English sentences as
if I spoke German...) All just my humble opinion, of course.
Marc Ruehlaender
aka HomDoq
[email protected]