[191] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: (long) Comparisons between Klingon and other languages
dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Feb 16 19:19:47 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Michael Everson <MEVERC95@IRLEARN.UCD.IE>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 92 10:19:50 GMT
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 31 Jan 92 18:28:43 -0500 from
On Fri, 31 Jan 92 18:28:43 -0500 <mosquito@Athena.MIT.edu> said:
>Not to mention the syntax of describing nouns:
>
>The house is big.
>
>kabiir bayt
>tIn juH
>big house
Yes, but compare Russian, an Indo-European language:
dom bol'shoj (House--big.)
>
>The big house
>
>bayt kabiir
>juH tIn
>house big
bol'shoj dom 'a big house'
>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?
Maybe I just had the good fortune to be trained as a historical linguist--
or maybe it was the influence of Paninian functional case grammar--but I
could never buy the Chomskyan notion that syntax was so "deeply" essential
in the generation of sentences. I always thought those guys, and their
students, never started with the fundamental questions of how the (real or
imagined) world impresses itself onto consciousness, before comprehension,
before the selection of lexical items and their attendant phonology, and
finally their syntactic arrangement. Doubtless even that linear approach
is too, well, linear.... :-)
Not that this has much to do with Klingon..... I like reading the dictionary
(alas the OLD one is all I have yet, did you get my cheque, Eli??? {{:-) )
and looking for etymology. My favourite is 'Iw 'blood'. Eeeeoooooo.
>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.
Genetic program? Mmmm. Safer to suggest that aspect is a sensible basic
category.... Functional notions are (to me) more appealing than biological
ones, but then again I believe in free will.......
There are similarities with Hungarian, and Turkish, in the way affixes are
organized.
Michael Everson
School of Architecture, UCD, Richview, Clonskeagh, Dublin 14, E/ire
Phone: +353-1-706-2745
