Re: "be'be'" - double negation

["Sean M. Burke" <sburke@cpan.org>]

At 07:29 2002-04-15 -0500, Alan Anderson wrote:
>ja' "Sean M. Burke" <sburke@cpan.org>:
> >Was it?  Because except for its overly uniform syllable structure and
> >simple syntax, Klingon looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill American Indian
> >language.
>Look both closer and further, and you'll see that the similarity is not
>significant.  Yes, there are some non-Indo-European features of Klingon
>which mirror features in Athabaskan, but there are also features of Klingon
>which have counterparts in Hungarian, Chinese, Hebrew, and just about any
>other non-IE language you care to mention.

I'm thinking mainly of the potentially high morpheme count on verbs, the 
marking of evidentiality, and especially the fused subject/object marking, 
and the (apparent?) lack of non-finite verb forms (like how you say "I-sing 
I-want" instead of "singing I-want").


> >It's certainly not shockingly nonhuman like, say, Lojban is.
>"Nonhuman?"  Like Klingon, Loglan/Lojban was devised by humans, to be
>spoken by humans.  Perhaps "non-natural" would be a better term.

It was designed to be spoken my humans, but frankly it came out REALLY 
weird.  It was apparently designed by people whose main language experience 
was with predicate logic.  For example, the role-marking is totally unlike 
anything I've seen in any existing human language.  So yeah, non-natural.
I think of Klingon as the sort of brilliant inverse of that.

--
Sean M. Burke    http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/