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

Iikka Hauhio fergusq at protonmail.com
Mon Jan 10 05:12:48 PST 2022


> 1. Is this phrase grammatically correct?: be' Huchmo' paqmo' je.

Yes.

> 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).

The first interpretation is be' (Huchmo' paqmo' je) and the second is (be' Huchmo') paqmo' je. In both cases, the comma should be placed between Huchmo' and paqmo', so be' Huchmo', paqmo' je has the same meaning and the same ambiguity as the version without the comma. (Huchmo' paqmo' cannot be a noun phrase as it has two type-5 suffixes.)

A case where the comma does matter is be' Huch paq je, which could be interpreted in three ways: woman-money and book, woman and money-book, and woman, money and book. It is reasonable to think that a comma should never be used between components of a noun-noun construction, so if we want to exclude the "woman-money" meaning, for example, we can write be', Huch paq je. I think it is also reasonable to assume that if comma is used between some noun phrases, it should be used between all, making the phrase unambiguous.

> We don’t need a question mark for interrogatives. We do that with question words or the tag {qar’a’?}. We don’t need an exclamation point. We have prefixes and helping words for that. Can you use question marks and exclamation points? If your font supports it, sure, but even that is something we have no advice from Okrand for.
>
> Can commas separate a list of nouns followed by a conjunction so that the lack of commas can indicate noun-noun constructions within the list? Probably, but Okrand never told us anything about the use of commas. We’re making up any rules that we are following in terms of using commas. Klingon pIqaD may use punctuation consistently or it may omit it consistently, or it may use it inconsistently, like Japanese. We simply don’t know because Maltz hasn’t talked about it.

These writing system rules are not canon, and anyone can use whatever rules they want, but using reasonable, consistent and logical rules makes reading text easier. Because the notation we use (the Okrandian notation) is not used by Klingons, Maltz wouldn't have anything to say about it. In the fiction of Klingon, it's a system used by Earth linguists like Okrand and us. As it is not part of the Klingon language, I don't think it even should be something Okrand should canonize.

Iikka "fergusq" Hauhio
https://klingonia.fi/en

On Monday, January 10th, 2022 at 14.49, Will Martin willmartin2 at mac.com wrote:

> I think it is correct and ambiguous, and I think that Okrand has never explained punctuation at all, so I would not count on it to make any difference whatsoever as a tool for disambiguating anything.
>
> When TKD was written, Okrand was operating under the insistence by Okuda, the artistic director for the Star Trek Series, that we know nothing about the Klingon writing system. He insisted on this because he wanted to use pIqaD on Klingon sets without having to consult with anybody. He would just throw some glyphs on ships and consoles that fit his visual aesthetics and be done with it.
>
> So, Okrand used the Romanized Alphabet of his own design as a phonetic representation of spoken Klingon, over which he had domain. Given the merchandise opportunity, a font company came up with a font with the 13 glyphs that Okuda used which could only be used to make pretty gibberish, or you could use Okrand’s system, which no Klingon would understand, but humans who wanted to understand spoken Klingon could use to write down Klingon for recording or communicating with/for humans.
>
> Later, fans came up with what we now recognize as pIqaD with a full set of characters, and eventually “merchandise” appeal won over Okuda’s objections and trading cards and at least one poster were sold with pIqaD that actually can be read.
>
> But TKD tells you nothing about the use of punctuation, and Okrand has never subsequently talked about it. It just appears, like a sort of seasoning that cooks use for food without ever noting it in a recipe.
>
> You can use punctuation and it can help make sentence structure clearer in some cases by defining the boundaries between phrases so that a word that could be the subject of a preceding phrase or the object of a following phrase more clearly one or the other, but that’s about as bold as you can get in terms of claiming that punctuation could change the meaning of a sentence.
>
> We don’t need a question mark for interrogatives. We do that with question words or the tag {qar’a’?}. We don’t need an exclamation point. We have prefixes and helping words for that. Can you use question marks and exclamation points? If your font supports it, sure, but even that is something we have no advice from Okrand for.
>
> Can commas separate a list of nouns followed by a conjunction so that the lack of commas can indicate noun-noun constructions within the list? Probably, but Okrand never told us anything about the use of commas. We’re making up any rules that we are following in terms of using commas. Klingon pIqaD may use punctuation consistently or it may omit it consistently, or it may use it inconsistently, like Japanese. We simply don’t know because Maltz hasn’t talked about it.
>
>> 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:
>>
>> -
>>
>> Is this phrase grammatically correct?: be' Huchmo' paqmo' je.
>>
>> -
>>
>> 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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>>
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>>
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