tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 29 16:41:25 2001
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RE: "arbitrary" grammatical rules
- From: "d'Armond Speers" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: "arbitrary" grammatical rules
- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 17:40:45 -0700
And also, I think, led to the word {ma'} "accommodate."
-- Holtej 'utlh
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http://www.bigfoot.com/~dspeers/klingon/faq.htm
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alan Anderson [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2001 8:53 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: "arbitrary" grammatical rules
>
>
> ja'pu' SarrIS:
> >This is a fine example of Okrand violating his most
> frustrating rule as he
> >puts {-ta'} on {wuq}, the second verb of a Sentence As
> Object. We are told
> >in TKD that we are not supposed to do this. I hope we can
> consider this to
> >be an outdated rule, since Okrand has broken it a number of
> times, and he
> >has told us that usage is the key to understanding the language.
>
> ja' De'vID:
> >chutvam meq yIDel.
> >What was the reason for the rule?
>
> There are a number of grammatical rules that seem to be there
> for no good
> reason. A surprisingly large fraction of them are related to
> the single
> phrase uttered by Kruge in Star Trek III after his gunner
> destroys the USS
> Grissom:
>
> qama'pu' jonta' neH!
>
> The original script calls for the meaning "I told you, engine
> only!" By
> the time it received a subtitle, it had been changed to "I wanted
> prisoners!"
>
> The re-purposing of this phrase is the genesis of several Klingon
> grammatical concepts:
>
> * separate plurals for people and things
> * presentation of aspect instead of tense
> * clipped Klingon (explaining the usage in ST:TMP)
> * dropping {'e'} in SAO when {neH} is the second verb
> * forbidding aspect suffixes on the second verb of SAO
>
> It also led indirectly to the existence of two words for
> "officer" and the
> odd homophony between "engine" and "capture" words.
>
> -- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh
>
>
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