tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 22 21:16:16 2009

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



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

Re: The topic marker -'e'

Christopher Doty ([email protected])



> That sounds a little strange.  You shouldn't be "constructing" a
> grammar, as TKD already provides one.  Verbs, nouns, prefixes,
> suffixes, and chuvmey are all detailed.

Unfortunately, computers can't read English; they need a human to act
as intermediary and interpret the grammatical rules into
computer-coded rules.

> I will disagree strongly with this requirement.  Nongrammatical
> sentences can still be valid.  KGT even has a section on
> intentionally ungrammatical usage.

Non-grammatical, by its very definition, means not valid.  If there is
something "non-grammatical" that is "valid," then it isn't actually
ungrammatical, it's dialect or clipped speech or something else.  Most
English speakers would say that "ain't" isn't grammatical, even those
who use it.  It is, from a linguistic perspective, perfectly
grammatical, if not prescriptively "proper."

Ain't no such thing as a valid ungrammatical sentence.






Back to archive top level