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

[Robyn Stewart]

For me the lack of any time noun makes the naked words weird.  I read {ret
qaSbe'. pIq qaS} as "ago it didn't happen. from now it will happen."  I'd be
fine with {jajmey ret} or {Hoghmey pIq}. It's not the lack of a number, but
the lack of a time period that I find hard to read. What's funny to me  is
that {bIngwIj} now sounds ridiculous: just proof that we learn what to feel.
Or that those Saqrejnganpu' are complete dolts. 

- Qov 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: SuStel [mailto:sustel at trimboli.name]
> Sent: March 24, 2016 9:48
> To: tlhingan-hol at kli.org
> Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: van bom
> 
> 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/
> 
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