[87440] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Numbers with pronouns
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Wed Dec 2 18:13:43 2009
In-Reply-To: <f60fe000912021347v59a976e2g1c64212bf44344a2@mail.gmail.com>
From: Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 15:12:10 -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 13:47, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com> wrote:
> Funny, maybe, but not accurate. Many human langauges share this lack
> of a copula in some subset of sentences that would use one in English;
> the Russian present tense is a well-known example: "Ya russkij" = "I
> (am a) Russian." I don't think it would be a good idea to tell the
> Russians that they're all talking like Tarzan. :)
>
> When putting the same sentence in the past, the Russian verb appears:
> "Ya byl Russkij" = "I was (a) Russian". Since there's something you
> can point to and say "that's missing in the present tense", IMO, the
> Russian example is closer to Tarzan-speak than the Klingon.
>
> The fact that to put the sentence into the perfective aspect in
> Klingon you say {tlhIngan jIHpu'} implies to me that there's nothing
> missing, no element that you could say was being left out as Tarzan
> leaves out his "to be"s. That sentence a verb: {jIH}.
Bravo! My response to this would have been less diplomatic. Glad you
beat me to it.
> The word {jIH} may not be categorized as a verb in Klingon
> dictionaries, but parts of speech are largely artificial anyway; Latin
> grammarians considered nouns and adjectives to be the same category.
> What's important is that it's functioning as a verb syntactically.
Well, parts of speech can be artificial, but you can also build your
word categories from the syntactic evidence. Regardless, the label
given to a word in a dictionary is hardly the end-all be-all of word
classes. We know, for example, that Klingons clearly distinguish
verbs of quality from other verbs, but these aren't so-labeled in the
dictionary.
