[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon from Star Trek 2009

[David Trimboli]

On 3/24/2013 3:49 AM, Lieven wrote:
>
>> Dajatlhbogh vIyajbe'
>> I don't understand what you said
>>
>> Notice the lack of a head noun on the relative clause.
>
> On the other hand, don't forget that Okrand even does mistakes himself
> sometimes. We might call them "Klingon dialect" :-)
>
> cf. TKD 3.3.5
> lujpu' jIH'e'
> It is I who has failed
>
> Notice the lack of the prefix :-P
>
> That doesn't make it right nor a new rule. It's probably just a mistake
> since there is no further mentioning of it.

Some things are more obviously errors than others. Forgetting a verb 
prefix when you're emphasizing the subject pronoun is not an uncommon 
error, and the translation does not suggest that anything new—besides 
the topic-suffix—is being exemplified. It's also unclear what special 
rule this would be giving us if it *were* a special rule. And finally, 
using special, unattested grammar is a section of the dictionary meant 
to be showing us something else entirely is bad form, and goes against 
the writing style of the rest of the book.

On the other hand, we know or can surmise quite a bit about the headless 
relative clause on KCD. I think we can pretty much agree that Okrand was 
asked to translate original English into Klingon for the workings of the 
Language Lab. The authors gave him "I don't understand what you said," 
and he came up with {Dajatlhbogh vIyajbe'}; it didn't happen the other 
way round. Also, the English the Klingon in that it doesn't have a head 
noun in the relative clause; it uses "what" as a relative pronoun, a 
feature that Klingon does not have. I believe we can also presume that 
Okrand was NOT the one who chose which audio files got used in the game 
and which didn't; whether the phrase is grammatical had no bearing on 
whether it was used in the game.

Given all this, I don't think it's difficult to declare that {lujpu' 
jIH'e'} is obviously an error while {Dajatlhbogh vIyajbe'} is not 
obviously an error. Whether it is actually formally grammatical is 
another question—one that cannot be answered at this time—but I don't 
believe you can throw it on the scrapheap. Notice that I never tried to 
claim a new rule allowing headless relative clauses; I just point it out 
as "Okrand came up with it and there's no reason to think it was an error."

The only other explanation for it that I can think of is that it was 
meant to be part of a fill-in-the-blank construction. Remember that the 
game lets the user speak into a microphone and the program analyzes your 
speech. Now let *X* represent the user's recorded speech and /Y/ 
represent Okrand's voice. The plan might have been, upon detecting an 
unknown sentence by the user, to respond "*X* /Dajatlhbogh vIyajbe'/." 
This is just speculation. Countering this idea is the translation, "I 
don't understand what you said," which doesn't allow for the user's 
speech to be played back in the sentence.

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/