tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jan 22 17:44:23 2006

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Re: yopwaH

Shane MiQogh ([email protected]) 

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I never said it was a "code of english". I know it's common beleive of that. I myself constantly argue that in reaction to why Klingon is a language while al bhed, Covenent, and other such codes are not languages. Though, at the same time we must remember that indeed this language was created from an individual who knows a language other than his own creation. Most languages develop from other languages (through changes due to slang becomming correct speaking, and seperate slang forms from international boreders (dialect effect)) or are created from, nothing. Klingon is not a result of dialect changes and since he previously known a language (actually more, but it only takes one) it is safe to say he came up with his language, based on other things. How he did it we may never know, but if you know a language, you can't just sit down and write a random combobulation of letters that are pronouncable (based on your own pronounciation table or whatever) and still have a pattern. When
 making anything, everyone bases what they make on something. Marc Okrand could have done many many things, including making sentances that remind him of the object or verb, then do some sort of letter conversion or switch that way. For all we know, the HoD pun might have actually been made a multilingual pun on purpose. I'm hope i'm not being offencive in anyway, and at on the same not, we need to remember Marc Okrand is also a human being. His ability to write a language is about as good as anyone else's who knows 2 or more languages. He was the one to do it, and we must respect that, but we must remember, no one, including him, can come up with something from nothing...
   
  *cough* i know that was long, but i needed to get that out. lol

QeS 'utlh <[email protected]> wrote:
  ghItlhpu' Shane MiQogh, ja':
>They are either plural or singular for a reson.

As I said, if you can tell us what that reason is, then we *might* (but 
then, we might not) have a basis for saying that {yopwaH} is plural.

>If a *PAIR* of pants were a singular entity, then so would the klingon 
>version.

Again, Klingon is not a code for English, so there's no reason why the 
grammar of Klingon words needs to map to that of English words. A pair of 
pants *is* a singular entity. I don't think anyone would argue that a pair 
of pants is actually somehow two articles of clothing.

>It's hard to explain this, but... While looking it up, i realize that some 
>other languages have it as "pant",

Most others, in fact. The other languages I can think of the word "pants" in 
(French, Turkish and Ubykh) all treat it as grammatically singular.

...
>So, really, we would have to talk about okrand about this, cause he's the 
>one that made the word, and only he can tell us weather it's plural or 
>singular
>in klingon.

That's true, but in the meantime we can make a reasonable guess based upon 
Klingon canon (which is what we often must do in the absence of any other 
evidence). In Klingon, there's not one attested instance of a noun that is 
treated as grammatically plural although it's semantically singular. In 
fact, the opposite situation is the one we find: semantically plural nouns 
such as {ngop} "plates" are treated as grammatically singular, not plural. 
For this reason, I still think that {yopwaH} is not a grammatically (or 
semantically) plural noun, and that {yopwaHDaj 'oH yopwaHvam'e'} "these 
pants are his pants" is the correct form, not *{yopwaHDaj bIH yopwaHvam'e'}.

QeS 'utlh
tlhIngan Hol yejHaD pabpo' / Grammarian of the Klingon Language Institute


not nItoj Hemey ngo' juppu' ngo' je
(Old roads and old friends will never deceive you)
- Ubykh Hol vIttlhegh

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