[tlhIngan Hol] Clarification on SIch
SuStel
sustel at trimboli.name
Wed Apr 10 10:02:08 PDT 2019
On 4/10/2019 12:48 PM, Ed Bailey wrote:
> It seems this behavior is seen in Klingon verbs like *meQ*, where
> *-moH* is sometimes dropped. Perhaps this happens due to your
> out-of-universe explanation, but an in-universe explanation would be
> the desire for brevity, combined with pragmatics.
Wait, who determined that *-moH* is sometimes dropped from *meQ,* and
how did they determine it? I recognize that *meQ* is first defined and
used for us as /burn /and is used several times with the subject being
the thing that is on fire, and that KGT used it transitively with the
thing on fire as the object, but how do you go from that to saying the
mechanism behind this is a dropped *-moH? *How do you know it isn't just
that the subject and object of the verb are flexible in the same way
that English /burn/ is? (Which is probably the reason why the usage
changed.) Or some other explanation I haven't thought of?
>
> I'd cite this as an example of the deliberate disuse of pragmatics:
> resolving ambiguity by following a strict usage rule rather than
> choosing the most likely possibility as the speaker's intent.
You can't just declare that anything that seems wrong, but that you can
manage to understand anyway, is done intentionally and to be accepted. I
can usually understand Bingon, but I'm not going to call it acceptable
language variation. You can hypothesize something like this, but it's
just speculation, especially if you simply label every Englishism you
see in this way.
--
SuStel
http://trimboli.name
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