[89717] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Redundancy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Thu Sep 15 17:18:23 2011
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:14:05 -0400
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
In-Reply-To: <CAFK8js11aSW6guVhU5Fm3sOiFCMkesAxMi4e--pAhZH9woqfSA@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On 9/15/2011 2:18 PM, ghunchu'wI' 'utlh wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:00 PM, lojmIt tI'wI'nuv
> <lojmitti7wi7nuv@gmail.com> wrote:
>> We know that Klingons care little for grammatical redundancy,
>> dropping plural suffixes where the prefix makes it clear that
>> something is plural, etc.
>
> Or it could just be that nouns without plural markers are merely
> unmarked for a singular/plural distinction. Instead of starting with
> {qamDu'} and dropping the suffix, {qam} by itself can mean "feet"
> even before putting {-Du'} on it. This is an observed feature of
> plural suffixes. Whether it represents a larger disdain for
> redundancy is not so clear to me.
jIQochbe'chu'. It's not about redundancy. In fact, I don't really see
why we should believe that "Klingons care little for grammatical
redundancy." They are sometimes redundant where English is not ({jISop
'ej jItlhutlh} "I eat and drink," not {jISop 'ej tlhutlh}.)
>> So, I was wondering… DaHjaj megh wISop be'nalwI'.
>>
>> Does that make sense to people?
>
> After an initial moment of hesitation at the superficially malformed
> sentence, what you want it to mean is obvious. The idea does get
> through, but I don't think the shortcut it takes on the way there
> follows the rules. It sounds like a pidjin of Klingon and some other
> language that does work the way you're trying to use it.
Klingon verb prefixes must agree with the subject and object of the
sentence, even if either is not present. This is similar to the sort of
agreement that Spanish requires of its adjectives: they must agree with
the genders of the nouns they modify. You can't (as far as I know) make
the gender of the adjective disagree with the gender of the noun to make
a point.
Klingon verb prefixes carry a lot more meaning than Spanish gender, of
course, but I still believe you can't disregard agreement to try
eliminate nouns from the sentence. If you use the verb prefix indicating
a first-person plural subject and a third-person singular object, then
your subject *must* be first-person plural and your object *must* be
third-person singular, and vice-versa. You can only elide pronouns that
have antecedents, and you can only do this when they comprise the entire
subject or object. You can elide {jIH}, but you cannot elide {'ej jIH}.
You can't elide {ghaH 'ej jIH} either, but you could have just chosen to
elide {maH} instead, because it's functionally equivalent.
So... yes, I can make sense of it, in the same way I can make sense of
"we eats lunch today."
--
David Trimboli
http://www.trimboli.name/
