[tlhIngan Hol] ordering and scope of adverbials relative totimestamps

[Will Martin]

If telling people that their style deserves to be cramped is your style, perhaps your style deserves to be cramped.

We are a community of people with varying styles and opinions that all deserve to be heard. Here in the real world, there’s a Constitution that suggests that we have a right to free speech. I don’t remember signing that away when I joined this list.

For the record, I’m not interested in telling you to shut up, though it does wear on me a bit to get the sense that you’d deeply enjoy any opportunity to tell me that. I’m glad you are here. You are very skilled at this language, and your posts assisting new people here are often very insightful and helpful to them.

I’m not telling you that you can’t translate “Almost a year ago”. Go for it. Show us your solution to this problem instead of repeatedly telling me that I shouldn’t be saying that the language is not well equipped to translate it, and perhaps there’s an intentional reason for that based on something intentional by the language’s creator.

The language has a mix of fictional and real world origins to its features. It’s handling of “to be” had less to do with the fictional culture than that the linguist thought it would be interesting. The gender classifications came out of a weird movie editing of a line assigning a whole new subtitle to a filmed scene. The suffix system was created to make a small vocabulary go a long way. The OVS word order was intended to make the language as alien as possible, being the least common word order among the human languages that the linguist was familiar with.

Perhaps this fundamental lack of grammatical and vocabulary tools to indicate an approximate time period was an accidental omission for Okrand, but given the line which Okrand either wrote or collaborated on, “A Klingon may be inaccurate, but he is never approximate,” I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that it was intentional, and based on Okrand’s take on the cultural character of the Klingons. If nothing else, it gives him an excuse for not addressing the issue.

There have been several references to Klingons’ preference for direct speech, without vague, floral niceties that humans are so drawn to include. In our own culture, it is often said that younger people like to text instead of call because they don’t want to waste all that time saying, “Hi, this is George. How are you? I’m fine. Sandy says the new Smurf movie is out and she’s interested. Would you like to come along?” Instead, they text: “Smurf movie: U wanna come?” Maybe this is like that.

In English, we feel anxiety about suggesting a specific measurement unless we know for a fact that the measurement is accurate. We have a rich set of vague descriptors that can encompass different vague ranges. We choose the one that fits the vague range that includes the actual value. We are averse to being inaccurate the way that the stereotypical Brit or Japanese person is averse to being embarrassed.

Part of the appeal to the Klingon language for me is the way it makes me aware of characteristics of English that I would not have otherwise noticed. Without this “almost a year” problem, I would have understood this detail about English less. It’s not just “the way things are in language”. It’s “the way things are in English”.

We’ve got enough evidence to suggest that Klingons perceive this as indecisive and weak, or evasive and suspicious. Klingons are bold. Humans and Klingons alike will give you an exact number if they know the exact number, but a human will give a vague term if they don’t know the exact number, while a Klingon will decisively pick a number that is close enough and be done with it. No anxiety. And if you disagree on the number, then we can fight about it, because, hey, we like fighting. This is as good an excuse as any.

Klingons are not averse to conflict. They enjoy it.

Given all this, it’s no surprise that there is no simple way to encode the words, “almost a year” into an equivalent Klingon phrase, even if we humans really wish we could.

We can express the thought, filtered through Klingon culture, grammar and vocabulary, but we can’t turn the words “almost a year” into a similar collection of Klingon words that can be dropped into any Klingon sentence to replace “almost a year” in any English sentence we’d like to translate into Klingon.

Wishing otherwise won’t help. And if you are really offended by trying to figure out why this seems to be the case, well, enjoy being offended. It happens often enough that you do seem to get something out of it.

It would be great if we could discuss stuff without the vitriol, but perhaps it’s more Klingon-like to get into each other’s face.

Either way, I’m still here. And so are you. We might as well get used to it.

charghwI’ ‘utlh

Sent from my iPad

> On Feb 9, 2019, at 11:34 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> If telling people that they’re vague, wittering, and indecisive is your style, it probably deserves to be cramped.
> 
>  
> 
> You still haven’t told us the source of the cultural rules you’re citing. Where do we find all this about being precise to represent a ballpark? How did it come to be incorporated into the structure of the language presented in TKD?
> 
>  
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20190210/8dd4ac27/attachment.htm>