tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 05 08:17:06 2006

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: KLBC

Terrence Donnelly ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

--- [email protected] wrote:

> In a message dated 5/4/2006 10:01:20 AM Central
> Standard Time, 
> [email protected] writes:
> 
> > Yes, I remember that from when I studied Middle
> Egyptian years 
> > ago.  European scholars (particularly Erman and
> Gardiner IIRC) classed 
> > these as adverb(ial)s, but the question is:  Did
> EGYPTIAN grammarians call 
> > them "adverbs"?  (Indeed, what is the Egyptian for
> "adverb"?  Or "verb" and 
> > "noun" for that matter?)
> > 
> 
> 
> Did Egyptians even study language in any way similar
> to what we do now?  Or 
> like the Sanskrit grammarian did?  (Panini is the
> only name I can think of for 
> him, but I'm almost guessing).
>

It doesn't matter if Egyptians analyzed their language
or had a word for 'adverb'.  The point is that we
moderns can fruitfully apply the concept to the
language, 
so that, for example, we can understand why phrases
like mk wi Hr wAt "I am on the road" and mk wi ii.kwy
"I have arrived" are functionally equivalent.  

So it doesn't matter if Klingon grammarians consider
a noun-derived timestamp to be adverbial (or if
Klingon grammarians even exist).  By every definition
I know, it functions adverbially. They may call it
something completely different, and have a
completely different understanding of how it operates
in a sentence, but in human terms, it's still an
adverbial.

There's a story by (I think) Ted Chiang, in which
we encounter aliens for the first time.  It develops
that their science is derived from a very different
viewpoint than ours.  To calculate the angle of
refraction of a photon through a glass layer, for
example, our optical science will use a descriptive
formula, while theirs (as far as the humans could
understand it) seemed to be describing the 
reasons for a photon's choice of the path of least
energy in a multiverse of possible paths. (I think
he termed the human approach "ontological" and
the alien one "teleological".)  Yet when both species
sit down to make a telescope, the lenses produced by
either approach are functionally equivalent.

A sort of unspoken question over the years has been
if you can apply human linguistic analysis to
Klingon (or by extension, to a real, alien 
language).  I guess I have just chosen a side!

> lay'tel SIvten
> 

--ter'eS

Back to archive top level