[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: van bom

[SuStel]

On 3/24/2016 12:28 PM, Robyn Stewart wrote:
> Not that it’s canon, but {ben law’ ...} is a pretty common story opener,
> and in close to cha’maH qep’a’mey I don’t recall anyone objecting. I’m
> more comfortable with {ben qaS} than with the increasingly common (maybe
> only increasingly since the words were revealed) unadorned  pIq and ret
> as timestamps for people who just can’t bear not conveying the tense of
> the verb.

To be fair, there are times when you legitimately want to say something 
happened "in the past" or "in the future" without saying—or 
knowing—exactly when it happened. Sometimes all you know is that a thing 
happened "years ago" or will happen an unknown number of "days from now."

I don't think unnumbered time-stamp nouns are something to be 
discouraged. No one ever discouraged {bIngwIj} until we learned to say 
{jIH bIng} from KGT, despite the fact that Okrand never wrote {bIngwIj}. 
There comes a time when you have to use the tools you've been given to 
say things Okrand never said. I think underspecified time stamps are an 
example of this.

If, at some point, Okrand says no, you can't do it, then we stop doing 
it, and our previous uses of underspecified time stamps become wrong, 
just as all our constructions like {bIngwIj} are now wrong. Oh well!

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/