[Tlhingan-hol] Noun cases

Qovrobyn at flyingstart.ca Qovrobyn at flyingstart.ca
Sun Dec 4 16:45:16 PST 2011 

At 11:52 04/12/2011, André Müller wrote:
>That's not how linguistics works nowadays.

vISov. qech vIQIj neH. The question was asked, 
"why would Klingon be anything like Latin?" and I 
understood why the original poster had made that 
reference, so I was just making it more explicit.

>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).

Exactly. You're providing more examples for the same point.

>People who object to English split infinitives 
>are usually mutually exclusive to linguists, mind you.

But you're not pretending they don't exist, are 
you?  So you know that the influence of that 
original Latin grammar persists to this day. 
Linguists know a lot of things about language 
that most people don't. But I find that linguists 
are so familiar with the way language really 
works that they are sometimes surprisingly 
ignorant of what people without linguistics 
training actually believe. I'm trying to remember 
the title of a linguistics paper I saw that was 
amusingly parallel to "Scientists discover hitting hand with hammer hurts."

>So, what you describe here, are not rules, but 
>mere common patterns of description.

Did someone call them rules? Oh I guess I did, 
but only in the negative. "Common patterns of 
description" is a much better description, what I 
was getting at by mashing into boxes.

>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.

I have. And when someone who learned the basics 
of her first foreign languages thirty years ago 
out of fifty year old textbooks meets Khmer, the 
first thing she tries to do is to find SOME boxes 
to put the concepts in, even if they are Klingon 
boxes.  It's nice to have something to attach new knowledge to.

> 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

It's probably not that different from Russian 
with the tenses removed, but I'm told that case 
usage is one of the best ways to mark a 
non-native speaker of Russian. You grow up with 
it or you never quite get it right. :-(

>  [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?

It wasn't my thesis. I was just providing an 
explanation of the Latin thing.  I have been told 
that Marc went out of his way to make Klingon as 
unexpected as possible in comparison to Earth 
norms, in many ways. Translations of sample text 
in TKD makes it seem as though -pu' was 
originally a tense marker, though. Or maybe Marc 
was never that hot at languages with aspect, either.

>Languages with aspect but no tense aren't 
>uncommon, see Chinese or Thai for example. And they're well known, too.

I don't know them. Thanks to speaking a language 
with no tense and one with no aspect I now make 
no attempt to learn either as a tourist, and just 
throw in time stamps and a big smile.

>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://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".

Different question, but it would be interesting to see.

-Qov

P.S. I've just realized why I get two copies of a 
lot of list messages: people when you're using 
reply all to get around the lousy new list 
system, make sure tlhingan-hol at kli.org and the 
stoli address aren't both in there.


>Greetings,
>- André
>
>
>2011/12/4 Qov <<mailto:robyn at flyingstart.ca>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 <<mailto:fiat_knox at yahoo.co.uk>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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