Re: Slang

On 7/6/06, Michael Adams <abrigon@...> wrote:
>
> Anyone have slang in their Conlang?
There's slang in Klingon, described in _Klingon for the Galactic Traveller_.

A particularly popular slang construction is {-luH} or {-la'}[*],
since it fills a hole that's a bit more difficult to fill with (what
we know of) the standard language than many of the other slang words
and constructions presented in KGT.

I'm told that some people use this construction, and when someone
points out their "error", they respond that they're speaking slang...
when, in fact, that is the only non-standard component of their
speech. (Which doesn't make that much sense; if someone is good enough
to use colloquialisms, using only one but none of the others seems
odd.)


[*] For those of you interested, Klingon nouns and verbs can take
suffixes, which come in classes. No noun or verb may take more than
one suffix of a given class, so a noun with a type-2 suffix and a
type-5 suffix is fine but one with two type-3 suffixes is not.

Mostly, suffixes in the same class are syntactically similar -- for
example, type-7 verb suffixes deal with aspect, or type-4 nouns
suffixes are determiners and possessive --, but the two type-5 verb
suffixes {-laH} "be able" and {-lu'} "unspecified subject; 'passive'"
have nothing in particular in common besides the fact that they're
both type 5.

This makes it difficult, in the standard language, to use a
straightforward verb-plus-suffixes construction for something such as
"I cannot be killed", though one way out is to explicitly use {vay'}
"someone, anyone, something, anything" as a subject rather than the
"unspecified subject" marker.


Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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