[Tlhingan-hol] Type 5 on first noun

[Brent Kesler]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 4:33 PM, lojmIttI'wI'nuv <lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com>
wrote:


> A noun with a Type 5 suffix modifies a verb. It doesn’t modify anything
> else. It can’t. That’s not what Type 5 noun suffixes do.
>

This is the crux of the debate.


Trees vs. chains? Okrand never talks about that.
>

This is pretty basic linguistics though. If we limited ourselves to the
linguistic concepts Okrand explicitly defines, we wouldn't be able to talk
about the language to debate these question in the first place.

Okrand may have invented an alien language, but like the aliens in Star
Trek, it's not *too *alien. Tree structures are a "universal" feature of
human languages. If MO wanted to deviate from that, Klingon would be so
alien we probably wouldn't be able to speak it--and MO certainly would have
to write more than a grammatical sketch to describe it.



> Okrand would probably be appalled if he knew the arguments that get
> started because of titles he creates.
>

I had the same thought several times throughout this debate.


bI'reng
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