tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jan 07 07:02:45 2001

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Re grammar highlight each day: -vaD



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



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