[tlhIngan Hol] ordering and scope of adverbials relative totimestamps

[SuStel]

tlhoy tIq; laDpu'be'.


On 2/10/2019 8:52 AM, Will Martin wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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
>>
>
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-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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