[930] in tlhIngan-Hol
belated responses
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu May 27 00:41:07 1993
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Captain Krankor <krankor@codex.prds.cdx.mot.com>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Wed, 26 May 93 17:32:27 -0400
I have been somewhat remiss in responding, so what follows is
something of a grab bag.
>From Ken Beesley:
>The job of a linguist is to look at a language and try to discover and describ
e
>what its rules are. One does read any available descriptions of the language,
>but with caution, realizing that most existing descriptions are incomplete and
>all too often wrong. After examining the data, you hypothesize rules (both fo
r
>what is allowed and what is disallowed), and then you devise experiments to
>test those rules. That is, you devise questions for an informant, questions
>designed to reveal the rightness or wrongness of your hypothesis.
Not in this context. For "real" languages (i.e. those with a populace of
native speakers), I'm sure this is true, but tlhIngan Hol is not like that.
It is more often true that our job is to look at the rules and try to discover
what the language is. It is the premise of this list that Okrand
and TKD are the highest sources. Therefore the language must
conform to the published rules, not vice versa. Yes, it is
admittedly so that those rules are sometimes incomplete, and I am
hopeful that we will be able to get Marc Okrand to answer some of
our questions. But it is a fact that we will be able to ask only a
limited number of questions, far less than we have, so we have to be
prepared to deal with cases where we can not test hypotheses.
Indeed, I think there's enough evidence to support a *hypothesis* of
intransitive verbs. I simply don't think that, at present, we can
take it further than that.
>From Holtej:
>The question of "What is grammatical," is quite central, at least to
>the kind of linguistic study *I'm* interested in. We are cautioned
>against speakers' ruling out a particular utterance simply because
>it's pragmatically odd, while it may be *grammatically* fine.
>Chomsky's well-known example of this is: "Curious green ideas sleep
>furiously." (If I have this wrong, other linguists will correct me.
>The gist is right.) The point is, native speakers would flag this,
>but it's _syntactically_ sound. (I do, after all, study syntax.)
>The question of (in)transivity is at least partly syntactic, although
>I'm more comfortable with complement/adjunct, as I've said before. (I
>said it in Klingon, and I don't know how clear I was!!). Just because
>a native speaker would rule out "vIQong" doesn't mean it's
>*ungrammatical*. I would never say "I fly the bus," but it's not a
>transivity issue. So, something to add to the list is, if "vIQong" is
>flagged as ungrammatical by the native speaker (wink, wink), is it
>syntactically ill-formed, or just pragmatically incorrect?
Thanx, Holtej, couldn't have said it better myself. In fact I had
been planning to mention the sleeping ideas myself.
Again from Ken, this time about 'missing prepositions':
>So rather than asking Okrand for "missing prepositions," which presupposes the
>existence of such prepositions, it is better to ask "how-do-you-say-this"
>questions, such as:
Right on the money. I couldn't agree more.
>From nachHegh:
> What an odd coincidence! (or was it coincidence?) This very
> term "batlh'etlh" was used in last night's new ST:TNG as the
> name of qeylIS' sword (he translated it "Sword of Honor".
> It was one of the few Klingon utterances in the episode that
> sounded correct! {{:-( Did anyone catch was qeylIS said to
> Worf when Worf challenged him? It sounded like "nuq
> jatlhaq?". I thought it might be a mangled version of "nuq
> Dajatlh"?.
It sounded to me like "nuq jatlhlaH", possibly "What can he be
saying?". Then he seems to clearly say "nuH!", and somebody hands
him his weapon. Was anyone able to sort out the hosanna thing they
kept chanting to qeylIS?
>From marqem:
>> Even if I pick a verb that you classify as "intransitive", I
>> can certainly add -lu' to it.
>
>> yaymo' Seylu' "One is excited because of victory".
>As with my treatment of qaSey, I see that as a possible reading,
>but not one that follows clearly from our data.
Why not?
>From Nick Nicholas:
>Having survived the Conversational Klingon tape ("Buy or Die" indeed!), two
>offerings. First: the canonical sample of a language, artificial or not, seems
>to have always been the Paternoster. Without getting into any debate on
>religious bias, here's my rendition of it:
Well, I'll flaunt my ignorance. What's a 'Paternoster'?
--Krankor
