[87039] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: The topic marker -'e'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghunchu'wI')
Tue Nov 24 16:15:47 2009
In-Reply-To: <a1173fff0911241014k6d11f503l213a9d6df238178b@mail.gmail.com>
From: "ghunchu'wI'" <qunchuy@alcaco.net>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:14:52 -0500
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Nov 24, 2009, at 1:14 PM, Christopher Doty wrote:
> "As for linguists, the Klingon language is very plain (by which I
> assumed you meant straightforward)."
If I had meant "straightforward", I likely would have said {nap}.
{nIt} means more like "unblemished" than "unadorned", which is what I
think "plain" implies.
"As for linguists"...and then you don't say anything about
linguists. I'm not really sure what that is intended to mean, so I
guess you managed to express it appropriately in the Klingon. :)
You made one simple error which I can correct without understanding
the idea as a whole -- you had a space between {tej} and {'e'}. If
you wanted the type 5 "topic" suffix, you needed to say {tej'e'}.
> There's no way that I can find in any of the Okrand sources for
> obliques, instruments, etc.
I don't see how this relates to anything, but "instruments" can be
described thus:
{lemDu' pe'meH vutwI', warjun lo'} "The cook cut the hooves with a
cleaver."
> But, the 'e' seems to do this a bit in
> some places, so I was stretching. I could have said "linguists think
> that ...." but that doesn't have quite the sense I wanted.
It probably would have had the advantage of making sense.
Linguists think the Klingon language is very plain? No argument
there. Most of its speakers would agree that it's essentially a toy
compared to just about any natural language. Linguists think the
Klingon language is very straightforward? Again, no argument. Its
rules are simple and its exceptions are vanishingly few.
Alas, I find that "linguists tend to bring unnecessary preconceptions
to Klingon" is too often the case as well.
-- ghunchu'wI'
