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

[SuStel]

On 1/10/2022 9:49 AM, Will Martin wrote:
> 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.

This is also what I would suggest.


> 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.

Er... no, naming lists was a thing long before English existed. I 
daresay that naming lists probably existed before conjunctions did. 
Certainly the Oxford comma, also called the serial comma, doesn't exist 
just because "some professor at Oxford" decided it should. The term 
/Oxford comma/ didn't exist until 1978. It was so named because the 
author was referencing the /Oxford Style Manual./

https://www.scribendi.com/academy/articles/oxford_comma_importance.en.html#:~:text=The%20Oxford%20comma%20has%20been,employees%20working%20at%20the%20press.



> By fiat, we now have to say, “A, B, C, and D”.

It's not by fiat, and it's not required. There are other styles. Some 
style guides argue against the serial comma. Sometimes you want to 
emphasize the conjunctions by including them between every term. There 
are all sorts of ways this can be said. You're making the situation 
sound like it has been ordered by a dictator.

Individual publications may and should have rules as to what style they 
require, but this is not the same thing as freely writing to, say, a 
mailing list. If you're writing for a publisher, you follow the 
publisher's rules. If you're not writing for a publisher, you write how 
you want to write.


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

I wholeheartedly disagree. Use punctuation liberally to clarify your 
meaning, because text lacks the cues that one adds to speech. Use 
punctuation because your words will often be ambiguous even if they are 
the absolute best way to express something. Use punctuation because a 
wordsmith who does not use every tool in his or her bag crafts an 
inferior product.


-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name
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