tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 21 11:29:52 2004
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Re: paghHu'/paghleS
On Fri, 21 May 2004, David Trimboli wrote:
> This theory is not attested in any canonical Klingon we know. It's
> possible, but there is no evidence to support it. It's also possible that
> the nuance you're describing doesn't exist.
I do like the nuance described, it's very "logical", but I agree with you,
that there is nothing to really support it.
In fact, I would argue that there is just as much to defeat the proposal
-- namely, that we do know the Klingon number system originally did not
have a concept of 'zero', so it's quite likely that /paghHu'/ is
nonsensical in that respect (kinda like saying "the zeroth day of the
month").
> Just because a language has a potential construction doesn't mean that
> construction is correct. In English, "I go to bed" and "I go to the bed"
> mean very different things, but you couldn't deduce why or what the
> difference was using only grammatical rules. It's just the way it is. The
Heehee, possibly a bad example. "bed" is both a noun and a verb, and
grammatically those two sentences ARE different; you can identify the
latter as using a prepositional phrase with a noun because of the presence
of the "the". The former is actually a purpose clause, and mirrors the
form of the less ambiguous "I go to sleep".
> rule you have submitted here cannot be proven by grammatical means; it needs
> to appear in canon, or to be explained by Okrand. None of us have native
> knowledge of Klingon idioms.
>
> Not every possible construction is productive. We have no way to determine
> what is productive in Klingon; we can only guess based on example. No
> example does what you suggest.
Keep in mind, though, that there are some things for which we have
"constructive rules". For example, none of the canon shows samples of all
the possible numerical phrases that can exist (there'd be an infinite
number of them, after all), but we have specific rules that allow us to
extrapolate their "canon" results.
Hrm. I can't find a canon reference in my TKD (don't have anything else
with me at work) for a construct such as */wejHu'/ (three days ago) --
all I have to go on is that /wa'Hu'/ is "one day ago", and /cha'Hu'/ is
"two days ago". This would lead me to believe that */wejHu'/ is legal,
and that one could continue the pattern. But we don't have a rule for it
(Strike 1, but I might just not be remembering where the rule is defined).
I also think it's interesting to note that in the TKD, section 5.2, zero
is NOT listed in the list of "Klingon Numbers". It appears later, in the
simple statement, "Zero is /pagh/." This could reinforce the idea that
/pagh/ is 'special' and not necessarily considered the same kind of
'number' that would be used to craft things. This seems to be confirmed
with some of the background material on CK that indicates the original
counting system only had three numbers, 1, 2, and 3 (no zero), and then
also seems to be correlated by the fact that /paghDIch/ is "slang".
(strike 2 -- although this reinforces my comments in the last HolQeD about
the idea of /<noun> pagh/ being used for "none of <noun>"! :)
So in the end, we have an idea that has about 1.5 strikes against it --
enough to put it firmly in the "danger zone", but not something to
necessarily dismiss out of hand.
Maybe Maltz will someday give us a heads-up on whether or not that
connotation is correct. ;)
...Paul
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