[87041] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: The topic marker -'e'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Tue Nov 24 16:30:47 2009
In-Reply-To: <FAF7086C-B178-465E-B31A-990006A8F8F4@alcaco.net>
From: Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:29:01 -0800
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 13:14, ghunchu'wI' <qunchuy@alcaco.net> 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.
Well, languages aren't "blemished" or "adorned," so I don't really
know what you are talking about, then. Klingon does in fact have
quite a bit of discussion about different forms (for example, the
alternate law'/puS construction with other antonym pairs mentioned
earlier today) for a conlang. And I don't have any idea what it would
mean for a language to be "blemished," so I can't really comment on
that.
> "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. :)
"As for linguists/as far as linguists are concerned/from a linguistic
perspective, Klingon is plain."
> 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'}.
Although I appreciate your correction, a misplaced space is hardly
worth noting, I would think, especially when there were several
grammatical errors in your previous email.
>> 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."
It relates to "as for linguists," as the way that one would say
something like this is with a sort of oblique phrase ("For linguists,"
"From a linguistic perspective," "With a linguistic background," etc.)
but this is lacking in Klingon, as for as I can tell. 'e' is the only
thing that shows up as adding an additional argument to a predicate
that goes on nouns, which is why I used it.
>> 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.
What I said made perfect sense, as far as I am concerned. As I said
earlier, I am stretching a bit, but just a bit--not very much. This
is a completely reasonable thing to say from everything that I have
seen.
> 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.
Again, you seem to think that people who know things that you don't
are automatically wrong.
