We all hate the rule.
Speak for yourself, not others. I don't hate the rule; I think it
adds character to the language.
In terms of the grammar being internally consistent and making sense and offering the most broad expressive capability, this rule stinks enough that even Okrand breaks it from time to time. I personally think it’s forgivable to let those exceptions in canon trump the rule, making it obsolete, so we can say, “Yeah, that’s an old grammar rule that people often ignore,” like the way in English, as years pass, people never use “whom”, but instead use “who” for either subject or object.
Don't speak for Klingons, either. You don't know that this is the
Klingon equivalent of whom. You can't go declaring that
it's disappearing from Klingon because you don't like it. Okrand
has given us some indication of language change in KGT,
and perfective on the second verb is not one of the things he says
is happening.
Yes, the English rule definitely still exists, and you really should say, “To whom are you speaking?” instead of “Who are you speaking to?”, but if somebody says the latter, everybody understands them, and most of the time, to be polite, you don’t even point out the technical error(s).
You're being a prescriptivist. You're declaring a rule imposed on
a language by some entity. The fiction of Klingon is that it's a
real language and that Okrand is our conduit through which we
learn how it works. In that fiction, TKD and KGT are descriptions
of how Klingon is actually spoken, not prescriptions for the
language, and not style guides.
English whom is disappearing from the language. It is so far removed from the language that it's perfectly acceptable in many circumstances not to use it. That's not a violation; that's the language.
There was a short-lived sequel series to Babylon 5 called
Crusade. The opening sequence of this show drove me mad,
because it twice had a character asking in melodramatic tones,
"Who do you serve, and who do you trust?" WHOM! It's WHOM, you
stupid show! But there we are.
It’s good to have the rule to explain the past, but I don’t think anybody should feel TOO attached to the rule for the future.
Please cite the canonical evidence that shows that this rule is
disappearing from the language.
It’s like the English word “ain’t”. We know it’s not proper, but it works, and EVERYBODY knows HOW it works.
Ain't is completely proper in the correct dialects. A style guide may tell you not to use it, but that doesn't make it wrong. There are circumstances where, if you said isn't instead of ain't, you'd actually be wrong to do so.
Take, for instance, the famous phrase "Ain't nobody got time for
that." In the dialect spoken by Sweet Brown, that is a completely
acceptable and proper sentence. She could not have said "Nobody
has time for that" in her dialect; it would mark her as not
belonging. Her dialect, and many others like it, have known rules
that are as grammatically consistent as Standard American English.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name