[tlhIngan Hol] action based language

Lieven L. Litaer levinius at gmx.de
Mon Nov 9 06:47:15 PST 2020


Am 09.11.2020 um 15:17 schrieb SuStel:
 > I don't tell people that Klingon is verb-centric. I focus more on
 > strategies of translating prepositions, adjectives, and genitives into
 > constructions that exist in Klingon.

That's an interesting point, and I'm curious to see how others argue
about this.

What I have observed is that many newbies come with phrases based on
nouns like "My love for you is strong" and then we suggest them to
rephrase it like "I love you very much".

And then I recently started to wonder why we do that. Is it really the
case that there are more verb-centric expressions or constructions than
nouns? Or did we really just make that up many years ago, when we were
missing so many words?

(I actually noticed that after a detailed word count showed that we have
about twice as many nouns than verbs; although 10% of them are names and
transliterations.)

--
Lieven L. Litaer
aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"
http://www.tlhInganHol.com
http://klingon.wiki/En/Verb



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