[tlhIngan Hol] I h-a-t-e transliteration

[De'vID]

On Sun, 14 Apr 2019 at 00:56, Daniel Dadap <daniel at dadap.net> wrote:

>
> On Apr 13, 2019, at 11:59, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So, who can seriously claim that the vocabulary we have is complete ?
>
> Thank qeylIS, okrand doesn't share your view.. Because if he did, and
> went on saying "don't ask for new words, everything is perfect", then
> soon he would be the only one using the language.
>
>
> My point wasn’t that we won’t benefit from more vocabulary. We absolutely
> will, as it will help us communicate more concisely. My point was that by
> the metric I was trying to imagine as one that would make sense for calling
> a language “complete”, Klingon is complete *enough* to be useful. Equating
> this with saying that there’s no room for further vocabulary growth is a
> false equivalence.
>

Also, even if a language is (sufficiently) complete, there's no reason not
to add more vocabulary. There's nothing wrong with synonyms, or specialised
vocabulary. If I had said {lojmIt qal'aq}, you can probably guess what I
mean, but {lIvqa'nan} is still a welcome addition.


> Does klingon have a word for the breasts of woman ? Does klingon have
> a word for "joint" as in "knee joint" ? Does klingon have a word for
> "ash" ? Are there any natural languages which lack those words ?
>
> So yeah, klingon *is* deficient, because it lacks essential words
> which ALL natural languages have.
>
>
> I don’t know all of the languages of the world, but I would honestly be
> surprised if there *weren’t* a natural language out there that lacked a
> dedicated word for at least one of those things. I would not be surprised
> if there were one that lacked dedicated words for all three. Different
> languages draw semantic boundaries in different places. And it’s not like
> you can’t talk about those things in Klingon despite our not having words
> for them (yet): {logh'ob} or {nIm lIngwI'Du'} for breasts depending on
> context, {SIHwI'} for joint, {Sor Hap meQlu'chu'pu'bogh} for wood ash.
>

{logh'ob} is a recent addition to the vocabulary. For a long time, {(be')
HuD} has been slang for breasts. ({(be') ngech} is officially slang for a
woman's cleavage, and {HuD} is just a natural extension of that.)

{rarwI'} has been used for "joint" (the mechanical part), and it would
probably work for an anatomical joint in context. {Hom rarwI'} might not be
precise enough in a few narrow contexts, but I bet in most situations it
would be understood. {SIHwI'} might work, but joints aren't always bending,
so maybe {SIHlaHwI'} or {SIHmoHlaHwI'}? Also, if it's a elbow- or knee-like
joint, you might be able to say {[body part]qIv} after the pattern of
{DeSqIv}, like maybe a *{telqIv} on a batwing.

(There's also a question with {SIH} over whether it means "the subject
bends" or "the subject bends the object". Do we know this?)

One an occasion on which someone had to express "ash" in Klingon, a slang
{mu' ru'} was coined. I understood it right away. (The word, which I
emphasise is made-up, unofficial, slang, etc., was *{voq}. If you're a
member of the club, you'll understand it without my having to explain it to
you.) The point is, the lack of an explicit dictionary entry word in
Klingon doesn't impede communication, and hence it's just as "complete" as
many natural languages.

I was almost about to say that there isn’t a dedicated word for “breast” in
> Tagalog, as the usual way to say that is the same way you would say chest
> (dibdib), but then I remembered that there is indeed a separate word (suso)
> that can only mean breast, it’s just not the first one that one would
> usually use when not talking about lactation. But the Russian situation
> with limbs isn’t far off. Russian uses one word (рука) to mean both “arm”
> and “hand”, and one word (нога) to mean both “leg” and “foot”. Does that
> mean that Russian is deficient and incomplete compared to other languages
> that do have separate words for the things at the ends of the limbs versus
> the limbs themselves? Russian also splits up what we call “blue” in English
> into two separate colors (голубой, синий). Does that make English deficient
> and incomplete?
>

Persian also has just one word for "hand, arm" and one for "leg, foot". It
also only has one word for "finger, toe". (English has as well in "digit",
but it's not used in common everyday speech.) This never really causes any
confusion, both because you can always be more specific (e.g., "leg-digit"
for "toe" to differentiate it from finger), and because there are assumed
defaults ("put your shoes on your legs" obviously means to put it on the
end part, not somewhere else).

And in Japanese, a distinct word for "green" to separate it from "blue"
only came into existence a thousand years ago, which has resulted in some
things like blue traffic lights:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-lights-blue

-- 
De'vID
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