[tlhIngan Hol] Multiple question words / markers in a sentence

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Feb 18, 2019, at 11:27, Will Martin <willmartin2 at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> We’re working in a language where we don’t get to make up our own grammar. We don’t get to conclude what undefined grammar would look like were we to go where Okrand hasn’t gone yet.

As we say in Klingon, “I don’t disagree.”

> You have an interesting story worth telling. People understood what was intended, but that doesn’t make it grammatical. I responded to the question as to whether or not it was grammatical. I said it wasn’t, and all the argument that has followed comes back to that point. I still don’t think it’s grammatical, and I doubt that I stand alone with this opinion.

I never asked whether it was grammatical. I asked if it made sense. Your opinion on that seems clear. I’ve not made the claim that it’s grammatical any more than HoD Qanqor claims that {yID} is a verb meaning “be Jewish”, nor do I think anybody else has made this claim. I’m not trying to convince you or anybody else otherwise, and I would go so far as to say that at least some of the people who chimed in and said the construction makes sense (which is all I was really asking about) probably share your opinion that it is ungrammatical.

My own opinion on “SaH'a' 'Iv” is that it does not follow any known rules of grammar. It also doesn’t explicitly violate any known rules of grammar. No more, no less. I won’t pretend to know whether it’s grammatical or not. You are probably right that it isn’t, but I think that claiming that something is ungrammatical because it doesn’t follow any known rules of grammar is jumping to just as much of a conclusion as claiming it is grammatical because it doesn’t violate any known rules of grammar.

> If your concern is whether or not it is grammatical, then I’m unmoved in believing that it is not. If you have some other point to make besides whether or not it is grammatical, then we’d go back and forth less if you didn’t include any suggesting that it sort of kind of is almost grammatical, right?

I’m not making any such suggestion. I don’t think we actually disagree on this as much as your response seems to indicate, which is why I find myself perplexed by this exchange.

I never had a point to make. I was asking if people thought that the construction, asking a question where the expected answer is another question, made sense. I went on to further generalize to using multiple question words in a sentence, and provided an example of a different sort where the question was actually two separate simultaneous questions.

I believe it’s possible and useful to ask these sorts of question about a construction independently of whether it is grammatical. Questions whose answers or lack of answers exist outside of known grammar are of particular interest to me, because the way people answer them sheds some light into how we each model the language as individuals. I’ve only been seriously studying the language for the past year, so my own mental model of it is still very much plastic, and I enjoy hearing the insights of those who have had decades to form their own mental models.

We can extrapolate from the understanding we have each individually formed from the information we have been given, and we will probably extrapolate differently. That’s fine. I’m not asking anybody to do this and claim that the result of such extrapolation is proper Klingon. I just want to participate in the exercise of “I encountered this utterance. It doesn’t follow any known rules of grammar. What does it mean to you? If we interpret it differently, how and why are our interpretations different?” If I produce a phrase in English (or any other language) that doesn’t appear to follow known grammar, it’s still possible for users of that language to talk about what that phrase might mean.

Here’s an example of a time I asked a question about an apparently ungrammatical piece of canon (since it’s canon, I asked in a less open-ended way):

http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/2018-November/009013.html

I have been trained to think of grammar not as a set of rules for language users to follow, but rather as a set of rules describing how language users use language. To use a comparison you seem fond of (albeit within a different context), the former is true of codes and the latter of languages. Klingon is special in that there actually is an authoritative source for all grammar, but I still think it’s useful to explore the spaces that haven’t yet been pinned down. Not to try to pin those areas down on our own, but just to see the different ways that different people build models of the language based on access to the same information. If you don’t think this is a useful exercise, that’s fine with me, but I still find it an interesting one.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20190218/b5387a08/attachment.htm>