I agree with SuStel. I’ll go farther and share that I think that {jatlh} originally was supposed to take languages or speeches as object and {ja’} was originally supposed to have people as object (hence {ja’chuq} is a word in the word list and {jatlhchuq} is not), but in canon, Okrand forgot this and created examples that didn’t follow his own original thought, so things loosened up. There’s a higher priority of making canon correct than there is for making the language consistent or have clear rules. Given how inconsistent natural languages are, I think that Okrand sees this as a good thing because he doesn’t want Klingon to be artificially consistent.

In natural languages, people screw up and others adopt the mistake, and it stops being a mistake. It just becomes the way the language is now, so deal with it.

I liked the language when it was more consistent, but I’m not interested in maintaining my own dialect, so I just try to keep up and I accept that I screw up from time to time.

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




On Jun 17, 2022, at 10:23 AM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

On 6/17/2022 10:11 AM, De'vID wrote:
I don't really see it as a new rule. I think it's more like a rule he has had in mind for a long time, and only partially explained previously.

What's an example of something that was wrong before but which is now right?

You're taking this as Okrand having thought all this out ahead of time and just not explaining it very well. I don't believe it. I think he didn't think things out so meticulously before, and now he's retrofitting an explanation that covers all the apparent contradictions and exceptions we've talked about over the years and which you showed to him. Kudos to him for finding an explanation that appears to work for everything, and I have no doubt that the original explanation of the prefix trick WAS simplified in the act of writing it, but I don't for a moment think this is the rule he was following all along. I think it took someone who had all the previous information coordinated for him to get him to finally piece it all together.

--
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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