[Tlhingan-hol] How would you feel about new Klingon morphemes? [was: New expression: Klingon for "dim sum" revealed‏]

[Rhona Fenwick]

ghItlhpu' mayqel qunenoS, jatlh:
> on the other hand, if you have started writing and expressing yourself
> in klingon, you realize that there is already too much vocabulary.

I wouldn't say "too much vocabulary" as such. Rather, that the vocabulary we have is already quite rich - that doesn't mean it's an "excess", though. I'd hate to see it pared down.

taH:
> on one hand we celebrate klingon's directness and spartan structure
> (e.g. we don't repeat plural suffixes where they aren't needed), on
> the other hand we are ready to say "ok, it doesn't matter if a suffix,
> which could save us the trouble of a long sentence is absent ; we will
> just write a railroad for a sentence instead, just to compensate for
> that suffix's absence. and we will like it."

Yet such railroad sentences are really quite rare. That's where we celebrate Klingon: we accept its shortcomings, such as they are, but don't allow them to detract from the power it does have. And sure, while it'd be neat as hell to have a frustrative suffix ("was going to but didn't"), or a desiderative ("want to"), or to have multiple additional levels of demonstrative (the Earth language Godoberi has a six-way division of demonstrative pronouns: this near me, that near you, that far from me, that far from you, that down there, and that that I just talked about), the fact is that plenty of other languages get away without them quite happily and Klingon does too.

To take your example of "at death", seeking a way to translate it as such still means one is thinking primarily in English, not in Klingon. In which sense do you mean "at death"? If you mean as in "I laugh at death", then it's simply a matter of working out the preposition's role and how it maps to Klingon, and {Heghmo' jIHagh} is quite fine for that.

taH:
> to ask for new vocabulary is futile. each of us could ask for a
> billion new words which would suit us. a musician would want his own
> terminology, a chemist his own, a doctor his own and go figure.

Well, that's true, and we do have to remember that we're dealing here with a language that's best suited to conversations that aren't arcane, jargonistic, or technical. But at the same time there are genuine and pressing gaps that may need filling. When such gaps have arisen, Marc has often been very generous in creating words to fill just those gaps. (For me, {vem} comes to mind. The difficulty of talking about traces left behind by an object no longer present was one I raised at the 2011 qep'a', and when we were given {vem}, that solved the problem neatly.)

taH:
> but to ask for a new suffix, is way more meaningful. a new word
> addresses the need of a single person ; perhaps the need of none. A
> new suffix however, could address the needs of many.

The question is, though, what are the absolutely pressing, crucial grammatical gaps that could be filled by such a suffix where they couldn't be filled by an adverb, a syntactic construction, or other such thing that doesn't require overhauling what we know about Klingon morphology? Even irrealis could be straightforwardly dealt with by an adverb.

I guess that's the other thing that makes me a little reticent about the possibility of new suffixes as opposed to new lexicon: a lexicon is fundamentally an open system, where affixes are closed. It's much easier to slip a new unit with a new meaning into the former category than the latter.

QeS 'utlh
 		 	   		  
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