[170] in tlhIngan-Hol
(long) Comparisons between Klingon and other languages
dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Feb 16 19:18:47 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: mosquito@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 92 18:28:43 -0500
I've noticed some similarities, too, but not limited to Arabic/Hebrew.
It's true Klingon has guttural sounds. It's true Arabic and Hebrew
have guttural sounds. There are only so many guttural sounds. Some of
them are bound to be the same.
I've also noticed, though, that Klingon S and D are somewhat like Arabic
S and D, in addition to having ', gh, H, and q.
Not to mention the syntax of describing nouns:
The house is big.
kabiir bayt
tIn juH
big house
--------------------
The big house
bayt kabiir
juH tIn
house big
--------------------
Now, mind you, I don't know too much about Arabic (It's safe to say I'm more
fluent in Klingon).
On the other hand, the use of -'e' for nouns is similar to that in Japanese.
In Japanese, a suffix -wa means topicalization.
(Suppose you're talking about a particular man, and then you get off the
subject, and you want to go back to talking about the man):
ano hito-wa teki desu.
that man enemy is.
jagh ghaH loDvetlh'e'.
enemy he('s) that man
That's where the use of 'e' and -wa diverge, though. One can, in Japanese,
say "ano hito-ga teki desu" if you're not trying to topicalize the man;
in Klingon, that's impossible. Also, Japanese doesn't treat pronouns
any differently (except that they're not used often).
Also, Japanese and Klingon both say "above", "below", etc. using
"in the area above", etc.:
Kompyuutaa-no ue ni
De'wI' DungDaq
Computer 's up at
(on the computer)
In the mid-80s linguists talked about a certain class of languages referred
to as "non-configurational languages" because they tended to have free
word order (S-V-O, O-V-S, V-S-O, etc. could all be used.) Some languages
were said to be "non-configurational" even when they didn't have free word
order because the cleanest theory of them seemed to be that, fundamentally,
they had free word order, but some process later forced the words in a
particular order. (Later, a paper by M. Speas (1990) showed that
non-configurational languages could be explained in a standard way,
making the distinction between configurational and non-configurational
non-existent.) What does this have to do with Klingon?
One of the features of non-configurational languages is "null anaphora", which
is to say, a sentence without an explicit subject would be understood
to have a DEFINITE subject. Note in Klingon, "tlhIngan Hol jatlh" means
"He/she speak Klingon." not "Klingon is spoken". Same with Japanese.
"Nihongo de hanasu" means "someone [in particular] is speaking in Japanese",
not "Japanese is spoken."
In fact, the use of verb affixes depending on subject and object makes Klingon
closer to a more non-configurational language Warlpiri, an Australian
aboriginal language that was influential in the big controversies on
non-configurationality.
The use of aspect but not tense is common in a large number of creole
languages. It seems that for Terrans, when a group of people re-make
their syntax, (or rather, learn their language growing up in an environment
where they can pick and choose from quite a number of syntaxes), there's a
tendancy to use aspect but not tense. One might go as far as to say that
aspect is a part of our genetic program to deal with language, and that
tense is something we made up later when we said, "language ought to work
this way, not that way." Not sure.
My point? Klingon has some similarities with Arabic, but it also has
similarities with other languages. No doubt, people who know, say,
Hungarian, might inform me there are similarities there. I don't
know. But I doubt Klingon was modeled after a single language. If
anything, it seems efforts have been made to make it like no
single language in particular.
\ /
--OO--
!! mosquito@athena.mit.edu
Kevin Iga
