[299] in tlhIngan-Hol
Causatives
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue May 5 10:29:12 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Mark E. Shoulson <shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Cc: tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us, Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com
Date: Tue, 5 May 92 09:50:34 -0400
In-Reply-To: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com's message of Mon, 4 May 1992 12:16:00 P
Compounding in Klingon does pose some problems of ambiguity. BTW, I didn't
make up QaghHommeyHeylIjmo', that's in the book, p.29. It was so useful in
remmebering the order of suffixes that I worked out
bIQong'eghqangchoHmoHlaHpu'neSchugh to do the same thing for verbs. Note
that it's not supposed to make a whole lot of sense, and it wouldn't bother
me if it were considered "ungrammatical" for semantic reasons; it's just to
keep the suffixes straight.
Anyway. Some of the ambiguity might be helped if Klingons aren't prone to
compound words terribly often on the fly. Thus, upon hearing a possible
compound, a Klingon would be less likely to attempt to dismember it as a
compound than to parse it as stem+affixes or some such, unless it was a
well-entrenched compound already. I think Okrand says that Klingons do, in
fact, compound on the fly, but I'd imagine hearing a new compound would be
less common than hearing stem+affixes.
Your questions about compounding compounds or affixed nouns are
penetrating; I'll have to think about those myself. One point though:
since unmarked Klingon nouns lack number, I can't see why anyone would want
to construct ?ropmeyyaH, since "rop" is plural enough, and the concept of
"single-disease station" is so rare that it would probably be explicated
more long-windedly.
I don't think you'll get much in the way on informants. Okrand said he got
ideas from the Native American languages he studied, but I doubt he based
Klingon all that strongly on a single one.
~mark
