tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon May 13 16:02:11 2002
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Re: Negation Article
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: Negation Article
- Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 20:02:03 GMT
> Hello, everyone!
>
> It is done!
> I am finally finished with my article about negation. By now, it got
> downscaled to negation in tlhIngan Hol, because it proved too
> time-consuming to learn enough about four or five other languages to
> make well-founded analyses about them. I hope my professor buys this...
Good luck.
> Unfortunately the list didn't let me send the 70k-attachment, so
> everyone who is interested in it will have to download it from my
> website
>
> http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~berger/tH-negation-dberger.ps
For those who had trouble reading the article, the ".ps" file extention means
it is a PostScript file. You'll probably need Acrobat Distiller (to convert it
to .pdf) or Ghostscript (to print it) to see the file.
> I hope some of you might have a look at this article and tell me what
> you think (don't worry, I have a very thick skin...).
Some points:
1. Paramount did not hire Okrand to create a Klingon language. They hired him
to direct the actors to make some sounds they could put subtitles to. He came
up with the language pretty much on his own and Paramount liked the idea of
selling dictionaries, so they went with it. What he did was well beyond the
bounds of what they hired him to do.
2. Klingonaase is not a language. It has no grammar, and the vocabulary
consists of dozens of words (exclusively nouns, so far as I know). The novels
talk ABOUT a language, and a few nouns and noun phrases are uttered in the
middle of English sentences in the novels, but John Ford never pretends for a
minute that he has actually developed a language. Another way to mark this
distinction is that tlhIngan Hol is an artificial language for a fictional
people, while Klingonaase is a fictional language; it doesn't exist.
3. The pIqaD you show is definitely not official. Some fans use it. *I* use it.
Meanwhile, Paramount does not recognize it. When you see characters that look
like this in the movies, you will discover that it doesn't actually spell
anything. Some of the characters don't quite match this alphabet, and Okuda
(the set designer) explicitly refuses to allow the letters to actually spell
anything.
4. You speak of "the retroflex D and t". The "t" is not retroflex. That is what
makes this {D/t} combination alien. Human languages can use either a retroflex
or dental "D/d" or "T/t", but it always happens with a pattern that Klingon
breaks. Let's say that uppercase letters are retroflex and lowercase are
dental. Human languages either use {D/T} or {d/t} or {d/D/t/T}. They either use
all four sounds, or they use a matched pair. Only Klingon uses an unmatched
pair, {D/t}.
5. You say that nouns can carry more than five affixes. Nouns can carry a
maximum of five affixes. There are only five noun suffix types and you are not
allowed to use two suffixes of the same type on any one noun, so you can have
from zero to five affixes (since there are no noun prefixes).
6. Your example <<SutlhtaHvIS chaH DIHIvpu'>> has a somewhat controversial use
of {-pu'} at the end. If this is an Okrandian example, it may have been written
written early in the development of the language when {-pu'} meant past tense,
but ever since the publication of TKD, it has marked the perfective, which
means that while they negotiated, we HAD attacked them. The attack apparently
preceeded the continuity of their negotiation. It would be better to drop the {-
pu'}.
7. You belittle the role of chuvmey to even lower than is true when you
state, "When studying tlhIngan Hol, it is important to know that this language
has the syntactic categories /noun, verb/ and /everything else/. That means
that any additional information has to be encoded with the help of affixes."
This is not entirely wrong, but it overstates the case. chuvmey do indeed have
a variety of syntactic functions (adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions) without need
of affixes.
8. When you describe a complex verb as being of the form pv123456789, you don't
mention rovers. You do eventually get around to them, but the description does
sound like that's it; there's nothing else to put on a verb.
9. You state that {-be', -Qo'} and {-Ha'} are rovers and so they can be
inserted between any two verb suffixes. All three of these can be used on verbs
totally lacking other suffixes, so there is no requirement that they go between
suffixes. More accurately, {-be'} can follow any verb root or suffix, {-Ha'}
always follows the root and {-Qo'} always comes at the end of the sequence of
the verb and its other suffixes (except Type 9, which follows it).
10. You state that the example {Soj Samqu'be' puq} disambiguates the meaning of
{Soj Sambe' puq} to show that the child did not find the food and went hungry,
rather than that something or someone other than the child found the food, or
that the child found something other than the food. I think you'd do better to
say {Soj Sambe'bej puq}. Otherwise, the meaning could be closer to {Soj tu' neH
puq. not nej vaj Sambe'.}
11. charghwI' and Will Martin are, despite appearances, the same person. No
sense crediting me twice by different names, unless you also want to credit the
others by their human and tlhIngan names.
12. Example 19 {muHoHbe' 'e' chenvIpmoHbe'} is probably misusing the verb
{chen}. Okrand uses {chenmoH} to mean "make", as in "cause to form". He does
not use it to cause an action to happen, as you have used it. The example is
attributed to charghwI'. I believe that never happened. I'd be amazed if I used
{chen} that way. I hope I didn't and then forgot. If I did write that, I must
have been very, very sleepy. Better would have been {qaSvIpmoHbe'}
13. {chab} needs no plural marker, since it would be redundant. It is not wrong
to say {wej chabmey}, but it is also not wrong to say {wej chab}, and is
probably even more common to omit the plural suffix when other grammatical
evidence shows that the noun is indeed plural. Klingon is less grammatically
redundant than most languages.
14. Other "standard works" for citations would be the other books Okrand has
written: The Klingon Way (a book of Klingon proverbs), Klingon for the Galactic
Traveler (a book discussing slang, jargon, dialects, food, music, dance, the
military and more. It also has the largest single vocabulary list outside of
TKD. Then there are the two audio tapes, Conversational Klingon and Power
Klingon. Most of these are avialable at KLI.
> There are two points where I am not sure whether the examples are
> correct, these points are indicated in the text. I'd be grateful for
> your input here.
I hope this helps.
> Thank you already
>
> Daniela B.
Will
(charghwI'}