[tlhIngan Hol] ordering and scope of adverbials relative to timestamps

[SuStel]

On 2/9/2019 6:26 PM, Will Martin wrote:
> Klingon is not my language, and I am not trying to stop anyone from saying_*vague, wittering, indecisiv*__e things_  using the language.

You need to stop using this phrase. It's not clever, it's just insulting 
and provocative.


> That doesn’t mean that I won’t weigh in with what I honestly think is an important link between the culture and language, because if you want to ignore the fictitious world that has a race in it that speaks this language and just be a guy who speaks it, you still have to consider that the guy who created the language was intentionally building a framework of language intended to be used by a culture that had certain characteristics.

No one is ignoring the fictitious world the language comes from. We're 
just not drawing unfounded conclusions about what one is allowed to say 
based on broad stereotypes.


> In other words, I’m trying to explain to you why this phrase is particularly difficult to translate. I’m suggesting that if you want to say what you are trying to say, there is a way to do it, even though you don’t like it because it doesn’t directly translate into the English equivalent.

It is not true that one's language better expresses the zeitgeist of 
one's culture than a foreign language does.


> Okrand has compromised a lot because the people who paid him to create the language and who continue to pay him to translate stuff are obviously less sensitive to his intentional design of the language to fit his understanding of the culture than he would prefer. The classic example was his focused intent on eliminating the verb “to be”, building that function into other constructions through adjectival/stative verbs, and the use of pronouns as verbs and the use of the topicalizer noun suffix if you have to a second noun that otherwise doesn’t have a grammatical reason to be there..., and then the director of the movie he was working on turned to him and said, “Give me, ’To be, or not to be.’”

You're being far more serious about it than Okrand was when he made it. 
He didn't get rid of /to be/ because of a profound connection to Klingon 
culture. When he made that decision, Klingons were just the black-faced 
bad guys from the original show, a brief appearance fighting VGER, and 
some lines on a page for the movie they were working on. He got rid of 
/to be/ because he thought it would be fun to make these curmudgeonly 
aliens' language kind of curmudgeonly.

"Focused intent" my eye. It was a whim that he followed through on.


> Yes, Okrand came up with {HochHom} to satisfy a translation request by someone who paid him to translate something that Klingon, up to this point, lacked the vocabulary for.

As I pointed out, he could have dropped the *HochHom* and it would have 
been /exactly/ what you describe: an exact measure of something that 
isn't actually exact but which gives the listener or reader the correct 
scope. This was the /only/ time he has ever used *HochHom *in a 
sentence, and he didn't /need/ to. Especially by your own reasoning. But 
he did.


> So, there’s a dent in this “may be inaccurate, but is never approximate”, intentional design of the language. But it’s a very tiny tool with limited scope. It doesn’t clearly solve our specific translation problem.

"May be inaccurate but never approximate" was not a consideration of the 
language when it was designed. /Power Klingon/ was written by Barry 
Levine "with Marc Okrand," and it came out years after the dictionary.


> He could declare that {benHom} means “Almost a year ago” and {ben’a’} is “More than a year ago”. Snap his finger and it’s magically true.

Ooh, I kinda like those.


> So, how can we work with this idea of communicating from a Klingon cultural bias?

You still haven't told us how you have determined cultural bias you have 
identified. Aside from "accurate, never approximate," what have you to 
go on?

In one episode of /Deep Space Nine,/ General Martok says, "The human 
fascination with what might have been is tiresome, doctor." It was 
sometimes suggested that this might be a reason we don't see a 
subjunctive mood in Klingon. I might even have said that myself. And 
then Okrand goes and gives us an irrealis construction, so we can say 
things like *jIHeghpu' net jalchugh, choHaqlaHbe'* /If I had died, you 
could not operate on me./ So Klingons /do/ have a way to talk about what 
might have been, despite a line from a Klingon.

Now that's one line from one Klingon, and no doubt /you/ weren't fooled 
by that, but the fact is that lines like that fail to lead us to rules 
of grammar or allowable or possible things to say.


> English favors analog readout. You can feel the weight of the difference between a couple and a few, or a very few, or quite a few, or kind of a lot, or a lot, or a whole lot, etc. Klingon doesn’t do that. Instead, if there are six or eight of something, you say six, or you say seven, or you say eight, and it doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong. You are decisively stating a number that is in the ballpark — that gives the person you are talking to a sense of scope and scale. And you are done.

Provide evidence of this.

Heck, name a human language that does this.


> It’s a language, not a code,

This is another thing you need to stop saying, for the same reasons.


-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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