[tlhIngan Hol] Verbs of measure

Will Martin willmartin2 at mac.com
Wed Mar 27 06:00:08 PDT 2019


aaaand THAT brings up the whole topic of prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar… Is it that the prescriptive rule holds and people violate it now and then, or is it that the language is changing and the rules haven’t caught up with the change yet?

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Mar 26, 2019, at 5:47 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 3/26/2019 5:33 PM, De'vID wrote:
>> But clearly, whatever TKD says, at some point it became acceptable for the suffixes {-taH} and {-jaj} to be used together. It may even be that {tlhIngan maH! taHjaj!} was re- or mis- interpreted as {tlhIngan maHtaHjaj!}, which was what made {-taHjaj} acceptable.
> 
> Or it may be another example of common ungrammaticality. Nobody who thinks about it accepts it as grammatical, but not everybody is going to be thinking carefully about it. We can't go invalidating a rule in TKD because we have an example that contradicts it.
> 
> People often point out the bit in TKD that says "when Klingon is actually spoken these rules are sometimes broken," but we must remember that it also says "What the rules represent, in other words, is what Klingon grammarians agree on as the 'best' Klingon."
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name
> 
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