[Tlhingan-hol] Interactions between verb suffixes

[De'vID]

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:
> Over time, I’ve come to realize that on this list, I’m nearly
> unique in having interest in expressing things clearly in Klingon, rather
> than the far more popular interest of stretching Klingon grammar to its
> extremes to see when it will finally collapse.

I don't doubt that you believe this, in the same way that people who
insist that English sentences can't end in prepositions believe that
they are making English more clear. What we have here is a divide
between prescriptivists and descriptivists (pabmoHwI' DelwI' je?).

Your interpretation that others are stretching Klingon is backwards
from a descriptivist perspective. From that perspective, it's you who
is trying to impose additional rules to restrict it from being as
expressive (including being as ambiguous) as it actually is.

Prescriptivism is an attempt to fix ambiguity using syntax when in
most cases it's resolved by semantics. Well, sometimes that fails too,
but that's not a bad thing. A lot of humour in language comes from
ambiguity.

I'm not trying to "stretch" Klingon grammar. I simply don't mind that
it sometimes produces grammatically ambiguous sentences. I like that
Klingon behaves like natural language in that way. If I cared about
restricting a language so that it can only produce unambiguous
sentences, I'd go speak a syntactically unambiguous conlang like
Lojban or something.

I also don't care if someone insists on speaking a dialect of English
in which no sentence ends in a preposition. But I do care if someone
goes around saying that people who don't speak English that way aren't
speaking proper English, and insists to beginners trying to learn
English that it must follow rules that it observably doesn't actually
follow.

-- 
De'vID