[tlhIngan Hol] ordering and scope of adverbials relative totimestamps

[Will Martin]

Thank you for your detailed, convincing argument. You put time into this. I respect that. You have presented good specific examples. Your logic is well thought out, and your presentation is not especially aggressive or disrespectful. This is refreshing. I’ll try to learn from this and improve my own arguments to be less disrespectful or unnecessarily confrontational.

So, instead of having an idea of why it is so hard to come up with a generic, acceptable way to say this, it now looks like {HochHom} is perhaps our one acceptable tool for giving one vague range of time: That of a near-complete duration. It’s not a very rich set, but it does seem appropriate to the requested phrase, “Almost a year ago”. Well done.

There’s still a lack of vocabulary for other vague ranges of duration to match the rich set of options in English. I never intended to suggest that Klingon could not translate English vague time ranges. My intent was to suggest that it is acceptable, in Klingon, to replace a vague fraction of a larger duration with a specific-even-if-innacurate number of smaller durations; to decisively posit a specific number rather than fret over whether or not the number is exactly right.

I still believe this to be true, though I suspect that {HochHom wa’ ben} or {wa'ben HochHom} [I will confess to not feeling consistently sure which is right] is the better choice in this instance. If you believe this is a mistake, I’m certainly open to further discussion. Meanwhile, if this solution is not acceptable, I don’t know what we could replace it with.

charghwI’ ‘utlh



> On Feb 11, 2019, at 3:21 AM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 at 14:52, Will Martin <willmartin2 at mac.com <mailto:willmartin2 at mac.com>> wrote:
> 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.
>  
> I *do* think that it's unreasonable to think that it was intentional, because the alternative is to believe that Okrand is some sort of omniscient being who has anticipated every use to which the language would eventually be put, when he's stated that he never expected Klingon to take off in the way that it did. 
> 
> For a long time, we also did not know how to do comparisons other than "X is [verb]er than Y". He's subsequently revealed that the comparison formula is rather more flexible than what was described in TKD, allowing for negations ("X is not [verb]er than Y"), equalities, and even ways to imply whether the quality being compared is positive or negative. All of this was done without his having been forced to do so because he had to fit something a Star Trek writer had already written into a show. He simply hadn't thought about it, and then he did.
> 
> If someone had been inclined, prior to the revelation of that additional information, to argue that Klingon culture favoured comparisons where one thing definitely has more of a quality than another thing, and that the language simply *couldn't* make any other kind of comparison, they'd have been right about that specific point (based on information known at that time), and they'd have been making the same argument that you're now making, but they would've turned out to be wrong about the conclusion that they drew from it. Similarly, the conclusion you have drawn doesn't follow from the evidence you've presented to support it.
> 
> Your entire claim is based on this one sentence that "Though Klingons are sometimes inaccurate, they are never approximate." You keep coming back to it as if it settled the question. It doesn't, though, because first of all it was said specifically in the context of telling the time (i.e., the hour of the day), and secondly there may be situations in which specifying a time as being shortly before (or after) an event is the least approximate thing you could say. 
> 
> Here's the quote in context:
> <Klingons have adopted the way most civilized planets in the galaxy tell time. They have twenty-four hour days. "Zero hours" means midnight, "twelve hundred hours" means noon, "nineteen hundred hours" means seven p.m., and so on. Klingons pride themselves on punctuality, so it is important to be precise when referring to time. Though Klingons are sometimes inaccurate, they are never approximate.>
> 
> The context here is *punctuality*. Instead of saying "in the evening", you should say "7 pm". On that we agree. One might argue that this extends to longer periods of time, outside the context of stating a time to meet, but that would be an *interpretation*. I don't believe that the quote text implies that a Klingon wouldn't say "almost a century" or "most of a decade", when the context has nothing to do with *punctuality*. I especially don't accept that it applies to a time in the past, where punctuality is just completely out of scope (unless we're talking about time travel).
> 
> The SkyBox example which introduced {HochHom} has already been mentioned, but there's a second one, from the Smithsonian exhibit:
> {tera' jar Soch, DIS wa' Hut jav Hut, maSDaq SaqmeH Qu' wa'DIch HochHom turlu'taHvIS, wej logh lengwI'pu' pa'mey 'oH Apollo wa'maH wa' ra'ghom bobcho' Columbia'e'.}
> "The Apollo 11 Command Module, 'Columbia,' was the living quarters for the three-person crew during most of the first manned lunar landing mission in July 1969."
> 
> Okrand wrote the Klingon translation based on an original English text that he was free to edit. (If you compare the English version of the exhibit and the bilingual one, the English text of the bilingual exhibit had been edited down to leave out unimportant details.) The evidence shows that he was free to leave out the "most" from the English text, but he chose to leave it in both the English and the Klingon.
> 
> It seems to be perfectly fine to express "most of a [time period]" in Klingon when the context has nothing to do with punctuality. When you're talking about "most of the 23rd century" or "most of the mission", there's no expectation that someone would be punctual, because the context is not about stating a specific time for a purpose. The only reason we can't easily say "almost a year ago" is because of how Klingon has separate words for "year" and "years ago" and "years from now", and we don't know how to modify {ben}. We can certainly say, for example, {wa' DIS HochHom ret}, using {ret} instead of {ben}.
> 
> Also, I don't really take seriously any claims in Star Trek along the lines of "species X always/never does Y". Spock says Vulcans don't lie (which is obviously a lie). We also find statements about Klingons (translated into Klingon) such as the following in Okrand's works: "No Klingon ever breaks his word", "Klingons never bluff", "Klingons do not faint". Granted, these were originally expressed by Star Trek writers and he merely translated them. But he chose those specific sentences to translate when he could've ignored them. (There are many more things said about Klingons than actually said in Klingon.) Does that mean that the Klingon language has no way to express exaggeration or falsehood, or talk about fainting? Of course not. In the same way, even if Klingons *prefer* directness, it doesn't follow that they *can't* express approximation.
> 
> There have been several references to Klingons’ preference for direct speech, without vague, floral niceties that humans are so drawn to include. 
> 
> But what does this have to do with "almost a year ago"? The "almost" isn't there for social politeness. It's there to distinguish that period of time from other periods such as "long before the anniversary", "on the date of the anniversary", and "in the time after the anniversary". In that specific context, those are the most accurate, most direct, and least approximate labels for the information that matters.
> 
> -- 
> De'vID
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