[tlhIngan Hol] "Seasons of Love" in Klingon / And two grammatical questions

[Will Martin]

We know that Klingon speakers are not bothered by repetition of words for clarity, so it occurs to me that you could say {be’ Huchmo’ be’ paqmo’ je…} as a way of disambiguating that the woman owns both the money and the book. Meanwhile, since nouns have no negating suffix, you can’t say “because of the woman’s money and the not-the-woman’s book” without being ambiguous.

Also, it might be tempting to push aside the lack of guidance from Maltz about punctuation and say, “But it’s obvious how this works,” because in our written language system, it is usually obvious how it works. Our use of punctuation is so rich with such established conventions that… well, consider the Oxford comma.

Because of the Oxford comma, which most serious writers accept, “A, B, and C” has different meaning than “A, B and C”. The second example links “B and C” as one thing, somehow more tightly bound together than either is to “A”, while the first example is a list of three peers with similar association. Note that this is a nuance of meaning conveyed in written English that does not exist in spoken English, unless you decide to use hand gestures or eyebrow emphasis or emphatic tone to try to act out a kind of verbal poetry to convey more meaning than your words would otherwise convey.

Punctuation evolves. Likely the apostrophe-“s” that follows a noun in English to indicate possession evolved from something like “Tom, his book” which was eventually shortened to “Tom’s book”, since the apostrophe generally stands in for something missing, but assumed. So far as we know, Klingon doesn’t have that kind of apostrophe.

American Sign Language’s equivalent is somewhat involved. You set it up by signing or spelling Tom’s name, then pointing to a spot in 3-D space to suggest that a ghost of Tom is standing there for referential purposes, then you point to the same space with your open palm to indicate possession (the same hand shape you’d use with both hands to press against your chest to sign the word “have”), and then you’d sign “book”.

Essentially, you’ve signed, “Tom, his book.” And no, you don’t have the option of fingerspelling “Tom’s” because that isn’t meaningful in American Sign Language, which has no written language. Possession is always done with the open palm pointing to the possessor. Written English is, to a Deaf person, a second language needed to communicate with the surrounding, dominant culture, similar to what English is for Mexican transient workers.

And in Klingon, we have only the position of the two nouns to indicate possession. “Tom book”. Or would that be “Tom, book”? I mean, if the original is “Tom, his book”, then it would be just as natural to keep the comma as to omit it. Just because that’s not what we did in English doesn’t mean that’s not what a Klingon would do.

See the problem?

We probably use commas between items in a list of nouns joined with “and” because this probably evolved from saying “A and B and C and D” and we got tired of repeating the “and” and decided to just briefly pause for the omitted “and”s and indicate the pause with commas: “A, B, C and D”, and then some professor at Oxford decided that there should be another comma added in front of remaining “and”, even though nothing is omitted there. By fiat, we now have to say, “A, B, C, and D”. Lots of canon examples before this academic fiat exist of “A, B, C and D”, but we ignore all that now because some professor at Oxford argued the point and convinced enough people that his way was the only proper way to punctuate from that point forward.

The temptation is to say {be’ Huch, paq je} vs {be’, Huch, paq je} to disambiguate “the woman, the money, and the book” from “the woman’s money and the book — or the woman’s money and book”, but we don’t know that Klingon doesn’t put a comma between the nouns of a noun-noun genitive construction, or that it does put a comma between members of a list of nouns followed by a conjunction.

Since Klingon follows the lists of nouns with a conjunction instead of putting the conjunction between the nouns, there never was a time when the conjunction could be replaced by a pause or a comma, so the punctuation might never have evolved in that way.

So, maybe they don’t put commas between nouns in a conjoined list. This idea might never have occurred to them. Okrand, writing in his Romanized alphabet, might put them in canon out of habit as an English speaker, but a Klingon might not do it in pIqaD. We simply don’t know.

We can do whatever we like with punctuation in Romanized notation of spoken Klingon, but we don’t really know how it’s done in pIqaD, so we don’t really know how punctuation is used in Klingon beyond perhaps the use of a period, if that. Most of our canon doesn’t use punctuation. Some of it does.

Is there optional use of punctuation in written Klingon that we haven’t seen yet? That last phrase pretty much makes it impossible to answer.

So, the less you rely on punctuation in written Klingon to clarify your meaning, likely the greater your authority on getting it right.

> On Jan 10, 2022, at 6:25 AM, luis.chaparro at web.de wrote:
> 
> Thank you, SuStel and charghwI' for taking the time to answer!
> 
> charghwI':
> 
>> I’m guessing that one is seeking an unambiguous expression that controls whether one is to understand that the woman owns the money and the book, or whether the woman owns the money and not the book.
> 
>> It would be easy to do if not saddled with the additional requirement that this level of unambiguous expression all happen in one phrase.
> 
> You're right, that's the problem I'm focusing on. But I'm not trying to avoid ambiguity :-) I just wanted to know if the Klingon expression is ambiguous and how I should understand this ambiguity.
> 
> SuStel:
> 
>> I can't follow what you're asking. Just put the type 5 noun suffixes on the appropriate place of each conjoined item, whether the item is a single noun, a noun-noun construction, a relative clause, a verbally modified noun, or something else.
> 
> Sorry, I was probably trying to address to many different things at once. Leaving aside *quwargh tach Qe' je* and DloraH's example, what I was trying to ask is:
> 
> 1. Is this phrase grammatically correct?: *be' Huchmo' paqmo' je*.
> 2. Without any further context, has that phrase two different meanings?:
>   a. *Because of the woman's money and book* (the woman owns the money and the book, and both the money and the book are the cause of something).
>   b. *Because of the woman's money and the book* (the woman only owns the money, not the book, and both the money and the book are the cause of something - to avoid ambiguity we could use here punctuation: *be' Huchmo', paqmo' je*).
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