[tlhIngan Hol] DSC Klingon Trailer transcription (NOT offlist)

SuStel sustel at trimboli.name
Wed Oct 4 11:54:01 PDT 2017


On 10/4/2017 2:38 PM, Lieven wrote:
> Am 04.10.2017 um 20:26 schrieb SuStel:
>> It's too bad you're not going to reply, because I'd LOVE to know why 
>> you think Okrand went out of his way, twice in that article, to 
>> separate first- and second-person objects from third-person objects, 
>> but he REALLY meant that ANY objects can do this.
>
> Because in the third person, this becomes ambiguous:
>  {ghIch qanob} can only be "I give you the nose"
>  {ghIch vInob} can be both be "it" and "him".
>
> But that does not mean that it's not correct to do.
>
> I am glad you chose that example, by the way. You say {Soj DInob} can 
> only mean "we give foods", but that's indeed nonsense, even in 
> English. Context makes clear it's "we give them food".

/We give foods/ is perfectly reasonable in English. /Foods/ means 
different kinds of food, each considered separately. If we give foods, 
then maybe we give apples and corn and bread and cheese. All of these 
could be described as a single mass, /food,/ but if we consider each 
separately, they are /foods./ Here are two examples I just got off of 
dictionary.com: /Breakfast foods have become very popular; /Fare /refers 
to the whole range of foods that may nourish a person or animal./

Is *Soj* only a mass-noun in Klingon? I dunno. But you can't make the 
argument by appealing to it being one in English, because it isn't 
exclusively one.

As for context, the example was given without any.


> I'd like to point at the end of the message:
>
> "I realize that this answer [...] is not by any means a complete 
> discussion of the several topics mentioned and I may have phrased 
> things not as clearly as they might be phrased. As a result, this 
> answer may end up just raising other questions."
>
> But - again - we cannot solve this ourselves without imput from Maltz.

If we cannot solve this ourselves without input from Maltz, then how do 
you justify using it in the transcript and calling it correct? At the 
very best you can say (with very silly reasoning) that we don't know if 
you can do it, because Okrand didn't address using prefixes for 
third-person objects. At the very best. But you're defending it as if it 
never even occurred to you that there's any question about the prefix 
trick in the third person.

And "I may have phrased things not as clearly as they might be phrased" 
certainly aligns with my claim that saying "it doesn't work in the third 
person" might very well mean "One day someone might come up with a very 
silly interpretation of what I'm saying here because I wasn't as 
explicit as he wanted."

But again, I'll consider any explanation you might have, and still have 
not offered, as to why Okrand went out of his way twice to separate 
first- and second-person objects from third-person objects.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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