tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jan 07 07:02:45 2001
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Re grammar highlight each day: -vaD
- From: "Sian and Roger" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re grammar highlight each day: -vaD
- Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 15:01:40 -0000
As a real live taghwI' can I put my two pennorth in about this?
Summary - describing Klingon by means of terms used for Indo-European
grammar is probably unhelpful to learners and certainly unhelpful to
me, is an inefficient way to teach languages, and is inaccurate,
since Klingon is not Indo-European.
And more fully:
As a spectator sport (like boxing, wrestling, tae kwon do etc)
GHED and the responses which always seem to follow make excellent
knockabout fun - but as a learner I've only found one posting
helpful, and that had to be provisional while I waited for the
usual storm of protests (which did not materialise on this occasion).
And in particular I find unhelpful and irritating the insistence on
forcing the language into an Indo-European straitjacket. Klingon is
supposedly from another planet, based IRL on native American languages
and there is no reason just to assume that concepts used in one
language group have any relevance to another.
Some newcomers, as DloraH says, are unfamiliar with some concepts of
grammar in English, and using an expression like "dative case", when
it was dead in English by 1100, can not help such learners learn. And
what about the people who visit (it is a World-wide Web) whose native
language is Japanese, Finnish or Hebrew? Using Indo-European
grammatical concepts is not only a needless burden, it sounds like
cultural imperialism.
I've taken exams in German, Latin and Hindi (which has 9 cases) (you will
note I am coy about what I passed) so I don't have a problem with the
concepts in the abstract but I just don't find it helpful for learning
a language which lacks these concepts. It's like trying to teach the
flute from a violin tutorial.
For me, all I really need to know is that "in, at or to something,
Daq goes on the noun (and so on). If I have been taught by means of
concepts like the dative or locative case, I would first have to analyse
the English in a somewhat unnatural way and thence to the actual Klingon.
I think the goal should be to get from thought to Klingon directly, rather
than having to go via the mother tongue, let alone having to take a
grammatical detour as well.
I should have thought the only grammatical concepts worth using to
discuss Klingon are, firstly, the ones Okrand uses in the TKD etc, and
(possibly) the ones belonging to the languages he based Klingon on.
In the past 5 years I've HAD to learn a language because I moved from
England to Wales. Syllabi for Welsh exams nowadays are not built on
grammar; they are based on competence. For example, learners will be
able to: introduce themselves; ask for directions, recount an incident,
express an opinion, write a letter expressing an opinion.
Most people interested in Klingon are probably going to want to do two
things: communicate (including receiving information) and explore the
grammar in depth. But even the latter group can't truly explore the
language until they have learnt it, which means being able to
communicate in it.
At present we learn Klingon grammatically, because that is how Okrand
wrote TKD - the natural way to describe a language is grammatically. But
that is not the easiest way to LEARN a language - did anyone's mum say
"mouse has an irregular plural, derived from the Old English mutated
plural declension"? No, she said "mice, not mouses, love". There are
millions of Indians, Germans, etc who use the dative case correctly
without having heard of the term. The closer the teaching is to the natural
way people learn language, the better.
Obviously, if peHruS finds it easiest to learn the language by using
grammatical concepts which are familiar to him, that's how he should
learn it. But assuming it will be easiest for other people is going a bit far.
naQSej