[Tlhingan-hol] Noun cases

[André Müller]

That's not how linguistics works nowadays. Maybe back in the 50s that was
common, but certainly not in the last decades. I still know some old
grammars and descriptions of "exotic" languages being described like "The
[common Latinide concept A] is expressed as XYZ." or "The superlative is
expressed by this-and-that means." (which in reality the language simply
doesn't have a superlative). People who object to English split infinitives
are usually mutually exclusive to linguists, mind you.

So, what you describe here, are not rules, but mere common patterns of
description. These got more and more independent of old school grammars for
European languages like Latin and Greek. Try reading a modern grammar for a
non-Indo-European language.

>From today's (and also 1984's) viewpoint of linguistics, Klingon is indeed
quite a bit exotic, but not because the grammatical cases are somehow
different from Latin (I still fail to see the exoticness of the Klingon
case [or let's say type 5 noun-suffix] system), but because some features
are typologically rare or uncommon on the planet (like OVS standard word
order or that N-N constructions are head-final while N-Adj constructions
are head-initial) or because some features usually don't occur together. Or
would you call the fact that Klingon has an aspect system instead of a
tense system a "deliberate" method to defy "future attempts to put Klingon
in those boxes", too? Languages with aspect but no tense aren't uncommon,
see Chinese or Thai for example. And they're well known, too.


One could actually get some kind of measure of the grammatical exoticness
of Klingon or at least an overview. Compare for instance the distribution
of features in the natural languages (WALS) of the world with the features
Klingon has (CALS):
http://wals.info/
http://cals.conlang.org/language/klingon

That could give a more objective view on how much Klingon differs from
natural languages and "the rules".

Greetings,
- André


2011/12/4 Qov <robyn at flyingstart.ca>

>  All kinds of languages with little or no Latin ancestry have been harshly
> mashed into that mould because someone sometime around the 13th century
> wrote a Latin grammar that became THE standard for not only all subsequent
> Latin grammars but all grammars of all languages compiled ever after. It's
> the reason people object to English split infinitives, for example.
>
> So Klingon wouldn't follow such rules but a linguist compiling a language
> could easily have deliberately defied future attempts to put Klingon in
> those boxes.
>
> - Qov
>
>
> At 16:07 28/11/2011, Noah Bogart wrote:
>
> Why would Klingon follow any sort of rules or models followed in Latin?
>
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 7:03 PM, Lucifuge Rofocale <fiat_knox at yahoo.co.uk>
> wrote:
>  > > Do you think that Marc Okrand may have deliberately designed the
> language to break the convention of
> > > noun cases?
>
> > What convention?
>
> The convention that nouns have to have recognisable declensions, following
> the model of Latin.
>
>
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