tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Dec 04 23:01:22 2007

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



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

Re: usage of type-7 aspect suffix {-pu}

Qang qu'wI' ([email protected])



On Dec 4, 2007 9:37 PM, Doq <[email protected]> wrote:
> If we could be more like children and just say stuff in Klingon, we'd
> probably get better at it than we would if we talk a lot about
> individual words and individual grammatical constructions.
>
>
This may be a complete surprise, but the motivation for all of my
grammatical discussions aren't too far afield of what you are describing
here.  Although, I'm thinking more about how children acquire their 'native'
tongue rather than how new languages are created.

I believe that it is somewhat accepted that there is a developmental
'window' that opens during early childhood in which a native language is
acquired in a manner that can't be repeated when you're an adult.  While
this may well be true, there is also probably a lot more going than we
realize even as adults.  For example, I've read of a rare affliction -
usually the result of brain trauma - in which an individual will emerge
spontaneously speaking their native language with a thick foreign accent,
unable any longer to speak their native tongue without the accent.

Since Klingon is just a hobby, I've been intrigued by the idea of
experimenting with allowing my mind to acquire it as it will rather than
using forced study such as memorization of vocabulary.  The problem is,
there isn't very much child-level material in the Klingon corpus.  My
approach when I first experimented with Klingon a few years back was to
construct small pseudo-stories using a limited range of related vocabulary,
and I also played around with creating 'picture' books.  I would create
them, set them aside, and then pick them back up after a time so that I
wasn't just going by remembering what I wrote when I created them.

But there is a catch-22, of course, in that I have to know enough to create
in the first place the material that I would like to use in order to learn
the language.  One of the things that was a concern is that when I picked
back up the material that I had created, I would find mistakes.  Sometimes,
systematic mistakes like forgetting to put the {-'e'} on the subject in the
"to be" construction.

I still want to pursue that approach - a sort of 'ingraining' approach.  But
in order to do that, I feel a need to be cautious in order to make sure that
I ingrain basic correct grammar.  I also have a desire to make deliberate
choices about which path to take when there are options (the least English
path if such a thing exists).

For example, one of the ideas I'm thinking about is a picture book something
like a child's picture book in order to ingrain the relative-position nouns,
using a targh (since I have a little targh graphic that I made some time
back). The title would be <<nuqDaq 'oH targhwIj'e'>>.  But prior to the
nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e' thread that just occurred, I would have used <<nuqDaq
'oHtaH targhwIj'e'>>.

This is a little long-winded, but I think the point is that discussing the
grammar in detail and being more like children in learning the language
aren't necessarily exclusive approaches.



-- 
Qang qu'wI'






Back to archive top level