tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Sep 25 12:07:44 2000

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RE: Navajo code-talkers


Voragh said:

[...]
> Several of us have read his dissertation and the consensus is that,
> although
> there isn't any direct borrowing of vocabulary (either whole words or
> affixes),
> there are some grammatical features of Mutsun - or at least Okrand's
> reconstruction of Mutsun - which seem very familiar to Klingon-speakers. 
> (These may, however, just be features of several Native North American
> language
> groups - such as the subject-plus-object verb prefixes, the experience or
> "certainty" verb suffixes [i.e. whether a statement is based on direct
> knowledge vs. hearsay], etc. - unfamiliar to speakers of modern European
> languages.  There are also, it must be noted, *many* features of Mutsun
> which
> are completely absent in Klingon:  most notably grammatical tense (though
> Mutsun verbs do have aspect).
[...]

I remember at the qep'a' javDIch in Las Vegas two years ago, that Okrand
mentioned this briefly. He was talking about similarities between Klingon
and other languages.  He didn't intentionally base it on specific languages,
and yet people see similarities between Klingon and language X, even if he
doesn't speak language X.
However, he did say that he took one item from the language that he did his
dissertation on. He said that this was {-Daq}, so apparently in Mutsun there
is a suffix that sounds similar and has a similar meaning. I haven't seen
the disseration, so I can't verify this or check to see if I'm
mis-remembering any of it, although perhaps someone else can.

- taD

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