[tlhIngan Hol] ordering and scope of adverbials relative totimestamps

[De'vID]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 at 14:52, Will Martin <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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