I completely agree that I should not be so cavalier about assuming the motives of others when they stretch Klingon grammatical constructions beyond the bounds of functional clarity, and I agree that while there are exceptional times that long, complex Klingon sentences might be justified, in most cases, in the interest of clear expression and best translation one should always consider the option of breaking down a passage expressed in one sentence in another language into a greater number of smaller sentences so that the constraints of Klingon word order and affix combinations don’t hinder the mind’s capacity to parse the words back into ideas that another language can better handle within the boundaries of a single sentence.

{yISIvQo’.  jIqIDmeH mu’tlhegh’a’ vIqonpu'.}

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




On Sep 24, 2019, at 9:34 AM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

On 9/24/2019 9:05 AM, Will Martin wrote:

Relative clauses are “light” grammatical tools, ill suited for heavy grammatical work. If you want to get fancy with relative clauses, you probably don’t really want to speak Klingon. You just want to mess with it. Marking the head noun with {-‘e’} already is about as fancy as Klingon gets with relative clauses.

Hang on there. I agree that you shouldn't construct extremely complicated relative clauses — or any clauses, really. Klingon is ill-suited to those long Victorian sentences.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Don't do that. But there are times and situations when longer sentences might be appropriate in Klingon, and we shouldn't assign motivations to people who do or hint that they don't belong. What we should do is suggest a better Klingon style and explain why it's more readable or understandable.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name
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