On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 3:53 PM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

Is it any more ambiguous than the English Romulan hunter-killer probe? Is that a hunter-killer probe that hunts and kills Romulans or a hunter-killer probe of Romulan make? Why isn't it a hunter-killer Romulan probe? Doesn't hunter-killer Romulan probe sound just plain WRONG to you, even though it can't be misinterpreted?

I do think the English phrase "Romulan hunter-killer probe" is potentially ambiguous. As you point out, trying to clarify the meaning simply by shifting a word doesn't sound right because of how English arranges adjectives. If I were worried that context wouldn't make things clear, I'd probably have to include other words entirely: "a hunter-killer probe built by Romulans", "a probe that hunts and kills Romulans". Both of those phrasings include relative clauses, and are a little more complex than a noun phrase. So I would probably be willing to put up with a little more grammatical ambiguity before I decide to move away from the simpler four-noun phrase.

This isn't the case with the Klingon, though. We don't know what sounds wrong to native speakers, and clearing up the ambiguity simply requires moving a noun, rather than rephrasing the idea entirely into a somewhat more complex form. It's less of a hassle to remove the ambiguity than it is in the English.

Does Klingon obey those rules? No idea. But when a native English speaker invents the language and translates into it, it's possible that he is unconsciously following those rules. I wouldn't declare this sort of thing solved, but it's worth examining Okrand's possible biases in this light.

That sounds like a reasonable explanation for why he phrased it that way.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the fact that a lot of Okrand's Klingon is translated from an English original, how that might have affected the writing style of canon Klingon, and what other sorts of less-English writing styles there are. But I don't have my thoughts together enough to really post about it yet.