[tlhIngan Hol] action based language

[Steven Boozer]

It would be interesting to find out whether newbies whose native language is not Indo European also have this fixation.  There have been Japanese learners on the list as well as a couple of Arabic and Hebrew speakers.  A complication is that anyone interested in Star Trek and the Klingon language probably knows English fairly well.  

I wonder what Okrand's experience with non-English speakers has been.  TKD has only been translated into German AFAIK, or have there been other languages?

--
Voragh

------------------------------Original Message------------------------------
From: Lieven L. Litaer

Am 09.11.2020 um 21:13 schrieb Steven Boozer  [Voragh] :
> Lieven (aka our "Klingon Teacher from Germany"), have you noticed a 
> similar fixation on missing nouns by German-speaking newbies?

Yes, that's what I wrote in my initial message, where I said that many Terran languages have that problem.

As a side note, I was not focussing on verbs that can be used as nouns nouns, such as "drink" or "sleep". The obervation was a lot more that people tend to use "real" nouns which describe an action. Here are ome examples that we would be able to translate using verbs:

"What is the definition of xyz?"
--> "how is xyz defined"

"What is your preferation?"
--> What do your prefer?

"My intention is to..."
--> "I intend to..."

"This is my final decision."
--> I have decided.

"The Exploration of space..."
--> "to explore space..."

"The preparation of the food is complete"
--> "I have finished cooking"

And so one. I'm sure there are more cases like this, where we would recast this using a verb.

And then, suddenly, I just remembered a nice canon example:
   "My death sentence was commuted"
   {vImuHlu' net wuqHa'.} (ENT)

THERE! noun --> verb
(I'll check if I find more canon proof for this.)

--
Lieven L. Litaer
aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"