[306] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Once more....
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed May 6 16:22:16 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Wed, 6 May 1992 12:12:00 PDT
In-Reply-To: "krankor@ima.isc:com:Xerox's message of 5 May 92 17:13 PDT"
Krankor writes:
"tlhIngan Hol is *explicitly* NOT based on any specific terran language
or type of terran language. According to Okrand himself, he incorporated
all sorts of things, from native american to chinese, and if he noticed
he was putting too much of any one language into it, he explicitely made
an effort to back off and use a different source. So any attempt to infer
things from any terran language is probably barking up the wrong tree."
While I thank Krankor for this information, I wonder if I'm the only one who
finds his contributions a little abrasive and supercilious? Something that is
explicit, to me, is something clearly stated or clearly defined--and the book
is silent on Okrand's inspiration. If Krankor has additional information,
perhaps from private communication with Okrand, I for one would appreciate the
information in a more neutral tone. Okrand might be having fun with him, and
with us all. It would help preserve the mystique.
Klingon does have some odd features, such as the OVS word order (very rare in
human languages), and the eclectic set of consonants. But as for Klingon not
being based on any "type of language," the morphology is garden-variety
agglutination. Found all over the world.
In case anyone's interested, here's an example from Aymara (spoken in Bolivia
and Peru) according to one analysis:
uta+ma+na-ca+pjja+samacha-i+wa
which, after a vowel-deletion rule, becomes
utmancapjjasamachiwa
('jj' pronounced like a strong Klingon 'H' or perhaps even 'Q', stress on 'i')
uta house (noun root)
+ma 2nd person possessive "your" (Type 3 noun suffix)
+na Type 7 noun suffix (verbalizer--used with following -ca)
-ca locative (Type 11 verb suffix)
+pjja plural (Type 12 verb suffix)
+samacha apparently/it_appears (Type 21 verb suffix)
-i 3rd person present tense (Type 22 verb suffix)
+wa topic (Type 24 verb suffix)
"it appears that they are in your house"
Corrections are welcome; I don't pretend to know Aymara. The "tense" marker is
probably really an aspect marker, as in Klingon. And the description of Aymara
morphology in terms of suffix classes (including morphemes to represent
possessive, number, adverbial notions like "apparently," and topicalization)
would be completely familiar to any student of Okrand's Klingon. So I would
still not be surprised to find that Okrand based his Klingon morphology largely
on some existing human language, in spite of reported denials.
And I could be quite wrong. I'm just having some fun here. And I think Okrand
is having fun with the language and perhaps with us.
Ken Beesley
