[tlhIngan Hol] ordering of multiple adverbials

[Will Martin]

To be honest, I completely agree.

The only reason I even brought up the idea of adverbial types was that if someone wants to start making up grammatical rules about how Klingon handles multiple adverbials (and no one should, but this discussion was leading in that direction), then we should probably start out by looking for patterns that already exist in other areas of Klingon grammar. Looking at the actual examples, certain adverbials appear to consistently precede other particular adverbials. That looks a lot like the behavior of verb suffixes.

There is no evidence that the order of adverbials depends upon their relative “importance”. We don’t even know how a Klingon would rate the relative importance of adverbials.

There is limited evidence that there is a kind of nesting such that each adverbial applies to all that follows it, though it could well be that the sequence is arbitrary. Meanwhile, he could have shown us that it is arbitrary by varying which adverbial comes first, but he didn’t, so it seems less likely that it is arbitrary.

It would be interesting if someone were to bring up the idea of adverbial types to Okrand. I suspect he’d smile at the idea. He might go with it, though I doubt it.

If he did, he’d probably go back and study the patterns he’s already followed, then expand on those patterns with ideas of his own and we’d have another little interesting tweak to the grammar of the language.

But, as I said, he probably would just smile and not offer us any further insight.

Any opinion the rest of us might form can color our individual approach to the language, but will not become commonly accepted practice by the body of speakers. It’s our language to use. It’s not our language to change.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Sep 17, 2019, at 9:17 AM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 9/17/2019 8:48 AM, Will Martin wrote:
>> So, how do we know that since the use of multiple adverbials is so uncommon, the linguists simply haven’t yet noticed the pattern of adverbial types? This could very well be an as yet undiscovered rule of grammar in Klingon.
> 
> We don't have enough evidence to prove it one way or the other. I don't think anyone here has declared that they've found the correct rule.
> 
> I would warn not to go by how things "feel." English has its own not-completely-understood scoping and ordering rules that may bias us toward one interpretation over the other. I imagine Greek does too. As none of us is a native Klingon speaker who grew up among native Klingon speakers, we can never be sure we have that innate sense of the rules.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name
> 
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