It would be interesting to find out whether newbies whose native language is not Indo European also have this fixation. There have been Japanese learners on the list as well as a couple of Arabic and Hebrew speakers. A complication is that anyone interested in Star Trek and the Klingon language probably knows English fairly well. I wonder what Okrand's experience with non-English speakers has been. TKD has only been translated into German AFAIK, or have there been other languages? -- Voragh ------------------------------Original Message------------------------------ From: Lieven L. Litaer Am 09.11.2020 um 21:13 schrieb Steven Boozer [Voragh] :
Lieven (aka our "Klingon Teacher from Germany"), have you noticed a similar fixation on missing nouns by German-speaking newbies?
Yes, that's what I wrote in my initial message, where I said that many Terran languages have that problem. As a side note, I was not focussing on verbs that can be used as nouns nouns, such as "drink" or "sleep". The obervation was a lot more that people tend to use "real" nouns which describe an action. Here are ome examples that we would be able to translate using verbs: "What is the definition of xyz?" --> "how is xyz defined" "What is your preferation?" --> What do your prefer? "My intention is to..." --> "I intend to..." "This is my final decision." --> I have decided. "The Exploration of space..." --> "to explore space..." "The preparation of the food is complete" --> "I have finished cooking" And so one. I'm sure there are more cases like this, where we would recast this using a verb. And then, suddenly, I just remembered a nice canon example: "My death sentence was commuted" {vImuHlu' net wuqHa'.} (ENT) THERE! noun --> verb (I'll check if I find more canon proof for this.) -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"