[87439] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Numbers with pronouns
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Wed Dec 2 18:11:31 2009
In-Reply-To: <4B16D56F.20004@trimboli.name>
From: Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 15:09:37 -0800
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 13:00, David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name> wrote:
> Yes, if you put suffixes on the pronoun, it's more verb-like than its
> English counterpart. But I didn't say that {tlhIngan jIH} was
> grammatically identical to "me Klingon"; I just said that saying one is
> the same as saying the other. The overall EFFECT is the same.
But these AREN'T the same. "I am a Klingon" is the same as Klingon
<tlhingan jIH>. If you're trying to capture the ungrammaticality of
the English, you need something different in Klingon: <jIjIH tlhingan>
or <jIH tlhingan>. Something that is wrong, anyway.
> Everyone has already jumped all over me saying "YOU SAID PRONOUNS AREN'T
> VERBS! SACRILEGE!" They're NOT verbs; they're pronouns. But in Klingon,
> (most) pronouns can perform some of the functions that verbs do, while
> still remaining pronouns.
>
> Klingon pronouns are halfway between nouns and verbs. They have features
> of both, but are neither.
If pronouns have features of both nouns and verbs, the real question
here is *what sets them apart from both of those categories*? We have
lots of words in Klingon that function as nouns and verbs. What is
wrong with considering the pronouns as simply another case of this:
sometimes they are nouns, sometimes they are verbs. They're called
"pronouns" because they are semantically unique from either, but that
doesn't mean that they are a separate syntactic class.
Actually, this is a good question. Do the pronouns ever behave in a
way that sets them apart from other parts of speech, syntactically
speaking?
> When I say {tlhIngan jIH}, I'm saying "me
> Klingon." When I say {tlhIngan jIHtaH}, I'm saying "me Klingon,
> continuous." If I say {DujDaq jIHtaH}, I'm saying "me, on the ship,
> continuous." The effect is a Klingon pounding his chest and saying "Me,"
> or pointing at a ship and saying "Me there!"
This isn't the effect at all, because one is ungrammatical and one is not.
> And regarding Christopher's demanding to know (once again) where Okrand
> said this: he didn't. I'm not repeating anything Okrand said; I am
> proposing a grammatical model and description based on available
> evidence. Accept it or not; I don't care. I haven't heard the old {jIQub
> vaj jIH} for a few years now; it's not something that's terribly
> important. It's just an amusement. Klingon handles "to be" the way
> Tarzan does, and that's funny.
I am "demanding" to know this because I don't really understand the
logic that people on this list. I have tried to both a) extrapolate
from what is known and b) strictly follow what is laid out in TKD and
elsewhere. Regardless of which strategy I use, someone comes back
with the other strategy. Because I was getting in trouble for
extrapolating, I was trying to follow TKD very closely, but then I'm
told that we can extrapolate. Why is this sometimes okay and others
not?
