[893] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: transitivity and "They Call the Wind 'Mariah'"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon May 17 06:04:32 1993
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Mark Reed <mark@cad.gatech.edu>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 04:53:28 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <9305141945.AA27179@codex.com> from "Captain Krankor" at May 14, 9
\I knew that was essentially the deal, but I never knew all the
\details. One thing has me puzzled, though. In order for all this
\to be true, it looks like qama'pu' was supposed to mean "I told
\you", meaning ma' must mean "to tell". But ja' is "to tell"; ma' is
\"to accommodate". Did he change this as well?
That's a good question; it didn't even click that it was the wrong
verb, or I would have asked him at the time. I can check the video,
but I'm pretty sure he didn't say anything about the ja'/ma' difference..
\Also, Clipped Klingon must certainly have existed before this. I
\know Okrand started by taking the stuff from STI, hence, for
\instance, the word baH for "to fire". But the captain in that film
\certainly says "baH!", not "yIbaH!". It looks more like the role of
\Clipped was expanded to fit qama'pu' jonta' neH.
You are, of course, correct...
The stuff from STI, by the way, was created primarily by James Doohan,
with some input from Mark Lenard...
\By the way, kudos to Okrand for 1) Taking the trouble to make the
\script change work and 2) doing it in such *fine* fashion. It's
\really interesting to discover that one of my favourite language
\features (the -ta'/-pu' distinction) was part of this after-the-fact
\kludgy backfit. Did he add -lI' at the same time? For that matter,
\if he had to add the -pu' plural suffix, did he add -Du' at the same
\time?
I don't know the answer to either of these questions ...
(Hey, I just saw the man at a con; it's not like I can pick up the phone
and ask him. :-) Maybe there's room on Eli's list for a couple of trivia
queries as well as the serious linguistic ones? I find the development of the
language at least as fascinating as the grammar itself (for instance, I know
there were a couple of additions made because of actors' mispronunciations
[when they weren't bad enough to justify a reshoot in the eye of the director]
- I suspect that HIja'/HISlaH is an example of that).
I would guess, though, that he already had the -lI'/-pu'
distinction, and then suddenly had this new verb suffix -ta' to do something
with, so he made a finer distinction in the perfective case. I can see
the plural suffixes going either way, but I suspect that there was no
distinction before the backfit...
-marqoS
