[lg policy] Klingon and other "crazy ideas" in book about invented tongues

[Kephart, Ronald]

On 6/21/10 10:55 AM, "Harold Schiffman" <haroldfs at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm told the "harsh gutturality" of Klingon was intended to convey the
> war-like qualities of their culture, and their mentality.  You know, sort of
> like German, or Arabic. As I understand it, they only talk about war; they
> have no other topics.
>

Hmmm...  In my classes almost every semester we do the “Klingon syntax”
problem in the Frommer and Finegan workbook. In this data, we find the
sounds [q], [x], [ɣ], and [tlʰ], none of which are unknown on Earth. The
most other-worldly feature in the data is that verbal inflectional prefixes
agree with both subject and object, but Aymara does this with suffixes. The
word order is OVS, but even that is not absent on Earth, just very rare.

I’ll try attaching a pdf of the problem, I don’t know if such things are
filtered out or not.

Ron

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