On Wed, 27 Feb 2019 at 17:40, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

On 2/27/2019 10:46 AM, Will Martin wrote:

We all hate the rule.

Speak for yourself, not others. I don't hate the rule; I think it adds character to the language.

I don't "hate" the rule either. I just often forget it's there.

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.

The fiction that we agree to is that Okrand is describing Klingon as spoken. But it's actually spoken over a period of centuries on the shows, all the way from just before the TOS era (in Enterprise and Discovery) to the end of the TNG era. TKD describes Klingon as allegedly related by Maltz, and it says that you can't have an aspect suffix on the second verb in a SAO construction. The two SkyBox cards are about the TNG era. Within our fiction, who wrote those cards, and in whose Klingon (and what time period's) were they written? It could conceivably be the case that the rule has changed or relaxed by the time of TNG, which is why {moj 'e' wuqta'} and {luDub 'e' lunIDtaH} are allowed. Or maybe it's allowed in Gowron's dialect, and not in Kruge's, and became illegal again after Gowron was deposed by Worf.

Of course, we don't know, so nobody should go around declaring that this is so. But Okrand's hints about language change and his invention of dialects has given us (actually, him) a lot of leeway to excuse inconsistencies.

(In-universe Okrand must be a time-traveler, because not only is he an active linguist all the way from the TOS through the TNG era, but he's somehow also made communication with Maltz possible in the late 20th/early 21st century.)

De'vID