[Tlhingan-hol] canonicity and transitivity

[De'vID]

Everyone's in agreement that published works authored by or consulted
on by Okrand, like The Klingon Dictionary, Klingon for the Galactic
Traveler, The Klingon Way, Conversational Klingon, and Power Klingon,
the Star Trek: Klingon game, and the Bird of Prey poster are canon,
correct? Someone sticking to only those sources would be producing
Klingon understood by everyone (i.e., everyone adhering to strict
Okrandian Klingon). (I hope that's an uncontroversial statement!)

Published interviews in HolQeD and the qepHom booklet with Okrand also
seem to be accepted universally as canon. These also seem to be
accepted as having the same degree of canonicity, if you will, as the
sources listed above. The only difference is that they are not as
widely available to the general public. (Well, I suppose neither are
the tapes and Star Trek: Klingon really all that accessible now. But
the point is that whereas the above sources can be easily found by the
general public, one has to at least already know about the KLI or the
Germany qepHom to have access to these latter sources.)

It seems like all lines spoken on The Original Series films are
universally considered canon, too. I think there may be some
uncertainty with words used in later films on which Okrand didn't
consult, primarily Star Trek: Insurrection. Okrand himself seems to
take the attitude that whatever spoken on screen is "right", even if
we don't know the Klingon "spelling" of what's said. Saying that there
are dialects seems to be his out for phrases or words that make no
grammatical or phonological sense in the language he devised.

And now we come to some greyish areas. The Hallmark commercial is
accepted as canon as far as the Klingon phrases go, as examples of
well-formed Klingon, but because there's not a one-to-one mapping with
the English subtitles, the translations don't seem to have quite the
same canonical status as published works in which Okrand clearly gives
an English gloss or explanation. Some words from Klingon Monopoly also
seem to fall into this category: {ghay} and {vabDot} have no given
English definition, and their meaning has been inferred from their
usage. The Klingon part of the paq'batlh was written by Okrand and
proof-read by KLI members, working from an English original text by
Floris Schönfeld et al., I believe. It seems to be accepted as canon,
though I think a few people are uncertain as to whether everything in
it reflects correct usage. (Does that seem like a correct assessment?)

There are also some other projects on which Okrand provided help, but
was not the primary author. The Klingon in the Talk Now! software was
done mostly by qe'San (Is that right?) but with Okrand's help for
clarification or to supply any vocabulary that's missing. There's some
disagreement as to whether the term (or description) for "hamburger"
belongs in different kinds of databases or dictionaries, but
thankfully the disagreements are about Earth things that don't really
matter to Klingons. The Klingon subtitle track for the Festival of the
Spoken Nerd DVD was done by myself (proofread by loghaD), with Okrand
supplying clarifications and vocabulary when it was needed. I
forwarded the parts of Marc Okrand's emails about the project
containing the new vocabulary and explanation to the KLI mailing list,
and those seem to be accepted with the same canonicity as any of his
published works. I also worked with some volunteers on Google's
Klingon UI, and some people volunteered to translated Facebook's UI as
well. Marc Okrand asked me to supply him with a list of required
vocabulary for these projects. (He asked me because I was coordinating
the Google project, and he requested also the vocabulary for Facebook
to be fair or neutral - I forget his exact wording. I'm sure others
have asked him about those words as well.) Many of those words
subsequently appeared in the 2014 qepHom booklet.

Have I missed any other canon sources? (There are various
miscellaneous things like fan magazines and trading cards, but I
believe the Klingon text in these have all been published in HolQeD.)
Does the above seem correct?

Now, Marc Okrand has also made a number of verbal utterances at the
qepHom and qep'a' when discussing grammar with students. (I have been
to several qepHommey, and I presume similar situations occur at the
qep'a'. However, there is a very high proportion of beginners at the
qepHom, which perhaps skews it towards discussions of basic grammar.)
These are mostly off-the-cuff remarks in response to student
questions. Since these are not prepared remarks, and maybe sometimes
he'll accept a suggestion to be polite, or he can get confused or
change his mind later, obviously what he says in such situations
cannot be taken to be as authoritative as in a formal interview or in
his own published works. But I was present when he was asked about
transitivity, and he stated that some Klingon verbs can take objects
even if it's not apparent from the English gloss, and that when he
wrote the English definitions he didn't really have transitivity in
mind.

Now, this may not be particularly helpful, because he didn't give a
list of verbs with this property. He was asked about some specific
verbs, some of which he assented can take objects, and others which he
rejected as taking objects (or as taking certain things as objects).
One of these was {Hegh}, or rather, I think he was asked "Can you say
'he died an honorable death?'" or something like this (maybe it was
"glorious" or "heroic", but it was something along those lines) in
English, and he answered yes. Now, obviously, you can already express
that idea in another way: {batlh Hegh}. But in the context of the
discussion, I don't think he was saying, "Yes, you can say that in
Klingon, but using {batlh}." I interpret his answer to mean, "Yes, you
can say something like {Hegh quv Hegh}." He did not explicitly say
this, and I think maybe the questioner didn't even mention the Klingon
verb {Hegh}, but I think that's the most reasonable interpretation of
his answer. (It may even be that {Hegh quv Hegh} is a stupid way to
express the idea. But that's a different question from whether it's
grammatical.)

He also said that verbs which are about statements would take those
statement as objects using {'e'} or something along those lines. I
didn't record his wording, and this is only my interpretation of what
he said. Again, he didn't supply a list of such verbs. My impression
of the discussion is that this would apply to verbs like {'Ip},
{lay'}, {nep}, and {vIt}. Obviously, one can already say something
like, {vulqangan jIH jIjatlhDI' jInep} or something like that. The
question was whether one can say {vulqangan jIH 'e' vInep}, and my
understanding is the answer is yes. He explained the difference
between {ghet} and {reH} and what objects they can take. He confirmed
that {Quj} "play a game" can take the game as its object. (This is
partially why I think the fact that the definition of {roj} "make
peace" already includes its object is no reason to believe that it
cannot take a noun like {rojHom} as its object. I have no *preference*
that it should do this. But this is how I interpret Okrand's
explanation of how such verbs work: that if the gloss says "[verb] a
[noun]", then generally his intention was for the verb to (optionally)
take that noun as its object. {roj roj} sounds strange, but it is no
less strange than {Quj Quj}, which, based on what Okrand said about
{Quj}, is grammatical Klingon.)

The one "statement" verb that I remember clearly that he assented to
as working like this was {Qoch} "disagree". loghaD wrote down {maQoch
'e' wIQochbe'}, and Okrand agreed that that was a correct sentence
with the intended meaning. The last time this came up, a bunch of
people said that they won't accept Okrand's assent to what someone
else has composed to be an endorsement of its correctness, because
Okrand will assent to things to be polite, and he's assented to
contradictory things to different people. This is true, and I
understand why one has to be careful about that. But this wasn't a
spur of the moment thing by Okrand. It took place in the context of a
much longer conversation (actually, several conversations throughout
the qepHom) about transitivity, where he was talking about verbs which
might not look like they take objects based on their definitions, but
do. And he didn't accept every single suggestion. He rejected, for
instance, the suggestion that {reH} takes a sentence-as-object (with
{'e'}) describing the play activity, suggesting to use {reHtaHvIS}
instead with such a sentence. He was asked about a number of verbs, he
thought about each one, and rejected some suggestions while assenting
to others. That's why I think there's a strong case that the object of
{Qoch} is the statement (referred to with {'e'}) to which the subjects
disagree. Okrand was specifically asked about this, in the context of
a conversation in which he had already rejected similar suggestions
about other verbs, but assented when presented with a written Klingon
example.

None of this is canon. Okrand could, if asked on another occasion
about the exact same questions, forget his previous explanations (or
change his mind) and give completely opposite answers. This is true.
But I also find it unlikely, because he had the whole qepHom to think
about the question of transitivity and verbs which take {'e'} as an
object, and could've changed his mind at any time, but didn't. He was
pretty consistent in what he said, which is also consistent with what
he's said on previous and later occasions. If I (or loghaD or one of
the other people who was present) had written the discussion up and
tidied it up, showed it to Okrand for approval (or at least confirmed
with other people who were present that it was an accurate summary of
what was said), and had it printed in the qepHom booklet, it would (I
think?) be accepted as canon. Of course, it was too late for that, as
the qepHom booklets are printed before the conference itself. But
maybe we should have done that. Maybe, in addition to pre-qepHom (and
qep'a') conference booklets, we need a post-qepHom (and qep'a')
summary of things Okrand said during the event, approved by him, to be
distributed to members of KLI.

I completely understand the need to be conservative in order not to
fragment the community. But I think that this introduces another
problem, as different people have different opportunities to learn
things from Marc Okrand that others don't have. For example, at the
same qepHom where I heard Okrand's explanation of transitivity, I
learned four new terms for body parts from 'ISqu', which she had
apparently copied from other people to whom Marc Okrand had revealed
them at the previous qep'a'. These words existed only in the memory of
the people to whom they were revealed and those they told, until
(AFAIK) I posted them to the KLI mailing list asking for their origin.
If I (or someone else) had not done that, those words would have
remained unknown except to a few people. (Search the archive for
{'IvtIH}, {rajma'}, {'eQway}, and {cha'neH}.)

But if {'IvtIH} is canon because someone heard MO say that it's a word
at some qep'a', then why isn't it canon that {Quj} "play a game" can
take a game as its object? If someone asks Okrand for a word for "hip"
and gets back {'IvtIH}, it's apparently canon. At least, once its
providence was traced back to Okrand, nobody objected to its
canonicity that I know of. If Okrand has a discussion about verbs that
take statements as objects, and someone asks him in the context of
such a discussion about the object of {Qoch} and he agrees that it's
the statement that the subject(s) disagree with, how is this factHey
less canonical than {'IvtIH}? Is it that new words are more easily
accepted than clarifications about grammar or existing words? Is it
that there is a belief that Okrand sat down and carefully thought up a
word for "hip", whereas his clarification of {Qoch} was spontaneous?
Is it that he is merely affirming what someone else has inferred from
what he just said, as opposed to making the statement himself?

I don't know the circumstances which led to the revelation of
{'IvtIH}, but presumably Okrand had been asked for body part words
before, and had thought about some of them. (I presume he'd put some
thought into {'IvtIH} because it contains a pun.) I do know the
circumstances under which MO stated that {Quj} takes an object and
agreed that {Qoch} does too, and that was in the context of a qepHom
where transitivity was one of the primary topics under discussion, and
he had at least the opportunity of a few days to think about it (and
retract anything he changed his mind on). He had at least come
prepared to speak on the objects of verbs having to do with truth,
deception, playing, and pretense, at least according to my impression.
loghaD's suggestion of the verb {Qoch} and Okrand's reaction to its
use might have been spontaneous, but AFAICT, Okrand considered it and
accepted it to be a correct example of the general principle he was
explaining. To me, it seems like this is as firm as the canonicity of
{'IvtIH}. (And especially since, from my perspective, {'IvtIH} is
hearsay, whereas I was there when Okrand explained about verb
transitivity.) At the same qepHom, Okrand confirmed that {ghur} and
{nup} are intransitive. He also said that {DIng} worked in the same
way as {jIr} grammatically. (At the time, I thought this was a
non-answer, but we actually knew that {jIr} is intransitive from KGT,
which means that {DIng} is intransitive). These facts seem to have
been accepted without reservation when posted to the mailing list. It
seems that there is some inconsistency between what people are willing
to accept as new information coming from Okrand based on hearsay.

What can be done to fix this? I agree that, in the absence of further
information, one has to go by what's printed. But Okrand has, in fact,
verbally given us more information about some things than are actually
published in print (or electronically). Absolute refusal to accept as
canon anything which isn't in writing splits the community in another
way: people who were present at certain conversations at qepHom 2011
(including loghaD and myself) consider it as confirmed that certain
verbs work in certain ways, because Okrand explained their usage, and
answered questions when asked about specific verbs and whether they
worked the way he had described. Absolute refusal to generalise from
specifics also paralyses the language. If {Quj} can take {Quj} as an
object, and if {ghob} can take {noH} as an object, and if Okrand has
explained that verbs of the form "[verb] a [noun]" can take things of
type "[noun]" as objects, it strikes me as good evidence that {roj}
can take {roj} as its object. The only legitimate objection here seems
to be that what Okrand says isn't necessarily canon unless it's in
print. (It "sounds odd" doesn't strike me as a legitimate objection,
because of {Quj Quj}.) That's perfectly fair, because he can say
things which he might change his mind on. It might just be that {roj}
doesn't work the way he explained about other verbs like it, and to be
safe we should not assume that any verb works like this until he's
explicitly confirmed it. But if he has said something to multiple
people consistently, at what point can we count it as canon, or at
least a very good guideline as to how to interpret canon? We are very
unlikely to receive canonical examples illustrating every possible
usage of every verb, so we have to make assumptions or generalise
somewhat.

I want to emphasise that I *do not care* and *do not have a
preference* for whether {Hegh}, {roj}, or some other verbs can take
objects. But I believe that they do, based on what Marc Okrand has
told multiple people consistently (not just at the one qepHom), though
not in print.

(Maybe the solution to this is for me to write up something about what
I believe Marc Okrand has explained about transitivity and verb
objects on prior occasions, ask him to approve or correct it, and
formally print it in next year's qepHom booklet or something, since
HolQeD doesn't exist any more.)

-- 
De'vID