[tlhIngan Hol] doubly {-meH}ed nouns

[Will Martin]

If it’s really true that those who argue already have the ability to say a given thing several different ways, then I recommend “Put up or shut up". Show us how good you are at doing this.

My point is, people here argue in English about Klingon much more than 90% of the time. Rarely does anyone show evidence of actually knowing how to say things using the language. Maybe many people here CAN do that, but since they so rarely do, their purported skill remains invisible and unproven.

I get tired of that. It’s deja vu all over again. And it pushes me to respond in kind. And I hate that. I hate doing THIS, RIGHT NOW.

Krankor complained about this decades ago, and this is probably why he’s not here anymore. Anyone who actually loves the language will get fed up and leave.

Why can’t we show any balance here? The list is supposed to be where we either write about the language in English or we write about anything using Klingon. 

So, where’s the Klingon?

The ceaseless, pointless arguments would be much less annoying if, a little more often, somebody actually went to the effort to write something in Klingon, just to balance things out a little. The part of my brain that wants to read well written Klingon here is starving to friggin’ death, while the ceaseless rantings in English go on and on and on.

And I will acknowledge that some beginners include a little Klingon here and there, typically while they fixate on a single grammatical construction which they want to beat to death in order to prove exactly how much abuse it could take before it died, but this is thin gruel for someone who would like to actually read and write the language now and then.

Based on the evidence of the balance typical to the list, we have more people who are clueless about how to put three Klingon words together than we have those who will write philosophical treatises about Klingon in English.

I’m one of the worst abusers. That’s part of what pisses me off so much. There’s so much here, in English, to respond to, I don’t have time to use the language.

And if I never use the language, why am I here?

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On May 15, 2019, at 4:52 PM, Daniel Dadap <daniel at dadap.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On May 15, 2019, at 14:36, Will Martin <willmartin2 at mac.com> wrote:
>> 
>> My point is that Klingon is a language, not a code, and ideally, if you want to actually understand it, you should speak it like a language, instead of taking English text and figuring out how to perfectly encode it into the one and only true and correct method to produce the one and only truely correct translation. That’s not how language works. That’s not how translation works.
> 
> But that doesn’t really seem to be what’s actually happening most of the time you accuse somebody of producing coded English. Just because somebody wants to explore the possibilities of grammar doesn’t mean that they’re doing so because they can’t think of a way to express a thought without some particular grammatical construction.
> 
>> I’m saying this because I genuinely believe that even at early stages, you learn much more by trying to express the same idea in Klingon using different vocabulary and grammar choices than you learn if you pick up a screwdriver and do everything possible that you can think of to do with a screwdriver before picking up a hammer and doing everything you can possibly think of with a hammer, and then pick up a hack saw and do everything you can possibly think of with a hacksaw.
>> 
>> That’s not really how you learn to fix things with tools. It’s just dicking around.
> 
> I agree that experimenting with different ways to say something is a good learning tool. But I don’t think you’re giving people enough credit here. You’re talking to people who already do know how to recast a thought in multiple different ways using different vocabulary and grammar. What I see happening here is not “I want to use grammatical construct X in Klingon; how do I do that?”, but rather “would grammatical construct X be meaningful in Klingon?” There’s a world of difference between the two. Just because people asking questions like that didn’t show their work to prove that they can think of other ways to say the same thing doesn’t mean that they’re incapable of doing so.
> 
> Yes, if we want to ensure that our meaning is understood by others we should stick to the grammar that Dr. Okrand has already described. But let us remember the words of TKD:
> 
>> The grammatical sketch is intended to be an outline of Klingon grammar, not a complete description. Nevertheless, it should allow the reader to put Klingon words together in an acceptable manner.
> 
> 
> Not a complete description. An acceptable manner. We don’t know what rules of Klingon grammar haven’t been described. We probably never will. What we can produce using only the rules that have been described is acceptable, but for all we know, native Klingon speakers often use double {-meH} or other such constructs and would find it weird, though acceptable, not to do so if the situation calls for it. Sure, if we choose to explore the undescribed and unknown areas of grammar, we run the risk of not being understood, of producing text that a native Klingon speaker would find unacceptable, or of violating an unknown rule that hasn’t been revealed yet. There are many reasons one ought to stick to what we know about Klingon. But doing so is not mutually exclusive with asking questions about what we don’t know.
> 
> And maybe dicking around isn’t a useful learning strategy for you, but it works very well for many people. There’s nothing wrong with dicking around.
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