[589] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Queries or 'Klingon Dictionary'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sat Apr 17 22:50:11 1993
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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: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 17:43:02 PDT
In-Reply-To: "A.APPLEYARD@fs1.mt.umist.ac:uk:Xerox's message of Sat, 17 Apr 199
>>(1) Apparent mistakes and unclearnesses. e.g. he says everywhere that
`Qaw'` = "(n) destroy". But English "destroy" is only a verb. Misprint?<<
There are quite a few little misprints in TKD. Nothing serious. What is
amazing is how well Okrand managed to avoid gross errors in constructing his
examples.
>>I suggest that verbs in his dictionary should be clearly marked as
transitive or intransitive or impersonal. Many English verbs can be used as
transitive and intransitive, and the transitive meaning is the causative of
the intransitive meaning, e.g. "burn". Does the Klingon equivalents `meQ`
mean the transitive or the intransitive English meaning? Does `meQ yaS` =
"the officer is burning" mean "the officer is on fire" (Greek 'keleustees
kaietai'), or "the officer is burning something, no need to say what" (Greek
'keleustees kaiei'), or both or neither meaning? Is `wov` = "be bright"
impersonal (= "it is sunny weather" = Latin 'solescit'), or intransitive (=
"(something) is bright"), or both?<<
You are quite right. The "dictionary" in TKD is just a simple wordlist, with
crude part of speech codings. As it stands, it is completely worthless for
computational linguistics and only barely supports the human student. I had to
recode everything for the Klingon analyzer, including making the distinction
between transitive and intransitive verbs. Where the English gloss is
ambiguous for transitivity, as in meQ (burn), we are left at a loss. The fact
that Klingon has a productive causative suffix -moH, might suggest that
examples like meQ will tend to be intransitive, so
meQ yaS would PROBABLY be "the officer burns (i.e. is burning)"
vs.
meQmoH yaS "the officer is causing to burn (something)"
Note that -moH is a productive transitivizer, parallel to the Esperanto -ig
suffix.
As for the impersonal verbs (typically weather things like be_sunny, rain,
snow, etc.), somebody should collect all the applicable weather examples and
write a short article for HolQeD. Is there anything weather-like on the audio
tape?
Ken Beesley
