Can someone sort this Star Trek item out?:
- Notably inverted in Klingon: though still a language a human can pronounce, it was made by a professional linguist and has both an alien grammar and unusual sounds. Unless, of course, you speak Tlingit, from which Marc Okrand borrowed precisely because it has sounds not in better-known/more widely spoken human languages.
- No, No, and No. Marc Okrand merely took one consonant, the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate. That is the only similarity. While both languages are agglutinative, one could say the same thing about almost any other native-american language, a subject about which marc wrote in his dissertation. He specifically made sure that it would not be to0 close to any existing language
- Notably inverted in Klingon: though still a language a human can pronounce, it was made by a professional linguist and has both an alien grammar and unusual sounds. Unless, of course, you speak Tlingit, from which Marc Okrand borrowed precisely because it has sounds not in better-known/more widely spoken human languages.
Compare the consonant tables on the Wikipedia pages. You'll see that they are dissimilar. I am removing that section of the article
Regarding all the uses of "Irish" as a language in this trope... maybe I'm wrong, which is why I'm asking now instead of editing, but wouldn't it be Gaelic? Or, at most, Irish-Gaelic?
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No. "Gaelic" is a language group consisting of Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. "Irish" is the technical and most used name in English for the indigenous language of Ireland. "Irish Gaelic" is redundant, like "Swedish Scandinavian". The reason Scottish Gaelic isn't just called "Scottish" is because it's might be confused with the Scots "language variety" of the lowlands.
Finnougrian grammar in Tolkien, not missable.
a) Are they related or not to Indo-European? Nostratic hypothesis says yes. First persons in -m (> -n in Finnish)/ -me = Indo-European first persons in -m (> -n in Greek), -mes/-men (Doric vs Attic, Latin has -mus): second person -t/-te = personal pronoun tu/-te (Latin: -tis);
b) Is Sindarin Finnougrian? The features it shares with Welsh are pretty secondary, since Sandhi features: like Quenya and Finnish, quite unlike Welsh, it has no gender.
Finnish and Estonian are related similarily as Quenya and Sindarin: Kalevi-poeg in Estonian has the word poeg (son, boy) which in Finnish is pojka (Q spelling: poika), and which resembles Welsh esp. in spelling, though of course unrelated.
I removed this:
- Irish ... often doesn't say "do" where other IE languages would.
How do "other IE languages", other than English, use 'do'?
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Irish "deanamh" (jeynoo) = "to do", "deanta" (janta) = "done." I studied Gaelic 30 years ago, so I may have forgotten stuff. There MAY be grammatical forms, where "to do" is such an obvious part of the sentence that they drop out the verb on the "Me, Ugg!" principle.
Most IE languages use the same word for "to do" and "to make". Fr "faire", Lt "facere", Gm "machen", Wl "gwneud".
BUT, Enlish applies the word "to make" both in the lietral and adjectival sense. Make a wheel, make a shoe, make a table versus make a wkeel bigger, make a shoe prettier, make a table shinier.
I removed a mis-explanation (beginning with 'For'):
- Old English possessed the vestiges of a dual, but it only indicated by the pronouns. Come Middle English, this dual number was gone. For those who aren't aware what this means, this means that they had phrases for saying single (I) exactly two (you) and more than two (you). In the South, something similar to a dual has reemerged: I (refers to the singular), you (refers to two people exclusively) and y'all, or you all (which refers to more than two people). Sometimes you see "you" used with a number, for instance, "you three" — that's an attempt to replicate the dual tense in modern English (which it doesn't do very well).
Someone confused dual number with second person, neither of which is a tense. At risk of belaboring the obvious, I'll explain:
- First person is I or we. It can be singular (I), dual (we two), plural (we).
- Second person is thou or you. It can be singular (thou), dual (you two), plural (you).
- Third person is anyone or anything that is not first or second person. It can be singular (he, she, it), dual (those two), plural (they).
- Singular means one. It can be first person (I), second person (thou), third person (she/it/he).
- Dual means two. It can be first person (we two), second person (you two), third person (those two).
- Plural means more than one; or, in languages with duals, more than two. It can be first person (we), second person (you), third person (they).
In some languages, including French and Russian, 'thou' (singular) is replaced by 'you' (plural) except when addressing one's intimates or inferiors. The same was true in early modern English; for reasons I won't go into, the polite form you entirely replaced the ordinary form thou in most dialects. That left the second person without a practical distinction between singular and plural, so Dixie invented y'all as a new plural beside the now-singular you. This has nothing to do with the dual.
Edited by Tamfang
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Split the article?
, started by PRH on May 12th 2011 at 12:22:42 PM
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