[Tlhingan-hol] Loose Klingon

ghunchu'wI' 'utlh qunchuy at alcaco.net
Mon Nov 28 18:43:43 PST 2011


On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 11:11 PM, David Trimboli <david at trimboli.name> wrote:
> Verbs as nouns
> These keep showing up.

Example? (I don't consider the paq'batlh chapter titles to be nouns.)

> what if most verbs can indeed be used as nouns—at least, the ones that seem
> to have obvious meanings as nouns?

There's a basic difficulty with that idea. Different people often have
different ideas of what is an obvious meaning. It would be nice if we
didn't have multiple opinions about whether the noun meaning
would/should refer to the action of the verb, or to its result, or to
a possible agent, etc.

> There may be other examples of "loose grammar" that I haven't thought of.

{tuQHa'moH} comes to mind.

> I'm not sure whether to take these as signs that Okrand can't keep the whole
> thing in his head and makes LOTS of mistakes, or whether Klingon is supposed
> to be more "yeah, whatever" than we give it credit for. Remember the rigor
> their grammarians give to parts of speech...

I take my cue from TKD's introduction:
> Many of the rules given in the grammatical sketch are those set down by
> Klingon grammarians. It should be remembered that even though the rules
> say "always" and "never", when Klingon is actually spoken these rules are
> sometimes broken. What the rules represent, in other words, is what Klingon
> grammarians agree on as the "best" Klingon.

This gives me a reason to consider that some of the examples might
merely be breaking the rules rather than negating them or giving us
new ones.

-- ghunchu'wI'



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