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

[lojmIttI'wI'nuv]

The deeply impressive part of the Klingon language, in my opinion, is that the structure of it was created in what was probably a couple months. He was up against a schedule when he came up with TKD. He didn’t add much with the addendum, and except for vocabulary, he hasn’t added much since then.

I’m very impressed that he managed to come up with this grammar that is so efficient at expressing so much. It’s easy to wish for something he didn’t come up with, but that’s true of every computer you use, every car you drive, every house you live in, every restaurant you visit, every painting you see in a museum, or any other creative thing that someone else came up with and then you come along as a consumer later and wish it was just a little better suited to this particular, unusual thing that you happen to be interested in.

I think the Klingon language is a jewel. In the few areas where it is less direct or more awkward than I’d like, I make it my personal challenge to come up with a way of efficiently expressing the idea with the language that already exists.

This is why I came up with changing the question, “Which pie do you want?” into the command {chablIj yIwIv!} Yes, Klingon doesn’t have a question word for “which”. So? It doesn’t need one.

It doesn’t need “at death”. You have {HeghDI’}. As a consumer, I prefer to focus more on using the tools of the language better, instead of wishing that the tools were better at doing things so I wouldn’t have to work quite as hard to express things.

You don’t translate an expression from one language to another. You translate the idea that became the expression in one language into an expression of the same idea in the other language, if the culture the language came from allows the idea you are trying to express.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Apr 27, 2016, at 3:52 AM, mayqel qunenoS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> the subject new vocabulary vs new suffixes, has a lot to do with the
> level of the speaker.
> 
> a beginner falls in the trap of requesting new vocabulary. why ?
> because he's not yet accustomed to expressing his thoughts with the
> existing one. so he reasons "if I had this word and that word", I
> would be more at liberty to say this and that.
> 
> on the other hand, if you have started writing and expressing yourself
> in klingon, you realize that there is already too much vocabulary. and
> exactly because you have begun using the language you frequently find
> yourself to situations, where your problem isn't the vocabulary (or
> lack thereof), but the lack of grammar.
> 
> I would love to have a suffix to express the irrealis construction or
> I would love to have a suffix to express the concept "at death" since
> I can't use the {-Daq} for this purpose. Sure, I can find ways to deal
> with the absence of such suffixes, but here lies the absurdity :
> 
> 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."
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> and as ambassador spock would say : the needs of the many outweigh the
> needs of the few.
> 
> mIv Hurgh qunnoq
> peace is a lie there is only passion
> 
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 10:16 AM, Rhona Fenwick <qeslagh at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> ghItlhpu' loghaD, jatlh:
>>> How would you all feel about learning more suffixes than the ones we
>>> currently know?
>> 
>> Several things come to mind, somewhat contradictorily.
>> 
>> For any new *grammatical* suffixes I'm neither for nor against them in
>> principle, but as Qov said, if they were revealed I'd also appreciate some
>> explicit handwaving as to why we didn't know about them before. The verb
>> suffixes that we know form a largish but by no means vast set. pojwI' counts
>> the number of distinct verb suffixes in Klingon at 36; much larger than
>> English, in which weak verbs have at most 3 distinct suffixes - /-s/, /-ed/,
>> /-ing/ (if one doesn't split the participle and the gerund) - but compare
>> another agglutinative language like Inuktitut, which has several hundreds of
>> inflectional and derivational suffixes. And the amount of canon text we have
>> by now is not really that small any more. It'd be good if any new suffixes
>> were accompanied by reasoning for why they haven't been encountered
>> previously - though it's certainly true that the answer could just as well
>> be "You didn't ask"! On the other hand, a new suffix might be a perfect
>> opportunity to incorporate the irrealis, which is the only major aspect of
>> grammatical expression I can think of that Klingon truly seems to struggle
>> with.
>> 
>> On the other hand, new lexical suffixes, and the domains in which they can
>> be used, would be interesting, though even so I'd think that they would be
>> found only in semantically limited sets. Ending for element names, say -
>> though even there English has several (-ium in general, but -ine, -on, -gen
>> for limited subsets). But the fact that such things are so semantically
>> bounded would mean that even there, I would be uncomfortable deriving my own
>> terms using such suffixes.
>> 
>> One thing I am very intrigued by, though, is the area of dialectic
>> variation, as others have mentioned. We already know that some dialects of
>> Klingon use a slightly different lexicon to that of ta' Hol. Is this true
>> for grammar, too? Is there a dialect somewhere that's innovated {neH},
>> already slightly unusual grammatically in not using {'e'} as a
>> complementiser, into a full-blown desiderative suffix? Are there dialects
>> that have incorporated other verbs into the verb complex, as ta' Hol seems
>> historically to have done with {choH}, {qa'}, {bej}, {taH}, {ta'}? And not
>> only with suffixes, for that matter - are there dialects that preserve
>> reflexes of the no' Hol verbal pronominal prefixes {me-} (3rd plural
>> subject, 3rd plural object), {'u-} (3rd plural subject, no object), and
>> {'e-} (3rd singular subject, 3rd singular object)? All these are merely
>> hypothetical, of course. But I'm intrigued by the possibilities.
>> 
>> QeS 'utlh
>> 
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> 
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