tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 23 06:34:11 2009
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Re: The topic marker -'e'
- From: Tracy Canfield <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: The topic marker -'e'
- Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:25:18 -0500
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2009/11/23 ghunchu'wI' 'utlh <[email protected]>
>
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 12:14 AM, Christopher Doty <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> 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 admit to being a little confused.
Perhaps it's because you're quoting Christopher throughout, but the
next sentences are addressed to me?
> Are you trying to implement
> machine translation *from* English *into* Klingon? That's quite an
> undertaking.
I'm the one who's doing the implementation. It's from Klingon into
English, which is why I'm trying to make sure it has coverage of
everything I know to be a syntactic rule in Klingon. Knowing, for
example, if focus can appear on more than one NP in a sentence
(outside a conjoined NP) isn't just trivia - it's something I neede to
make a design decision about, and if it's at all possible, I want to
make the decision that reflects what's known about the language.
It is a very large project even at this stage - I'm managing roughly
14000 lines of configuration files, including the base-form lexicon,
morphological rules, grammar, and transfer rules.
> No wonder you're bringing non-Klingon grammatical ideas
> into your arguments.
>
I'm not sure which of us is the "you" here, but if it's me: I have an
advanced degree in linguistics (of a different language, not English)
and a background in translation studies, and when I see something in
Klingon that makes me think "Some languages that do X do Y; Klingon
does X; does Klingon do Y or not? TKD doesn't say" I'd like to know.
[I've trimmed some responses from you to Christopher about grammaticality]