[143] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: comparative/superlative adverbs?
dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Feb 16 19:17:26 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: mark@cc.gatech.edu (Mark J. Reed)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 92 9:07:47 EST
In-Reply-To: <9201280120.AA00997@uhasun.hartford.edu>; from "Jeff Lee" at Jan 2
Kevin Iga (mosquito@Athena.MIT.EDU) writes:
\One of the "useful phrases" in the dictionary is "revenge is a dish best
\served cold." It comes out "bortaS bIr jablu'DI'reH QaQqu'nay'". After
\scratching my head for a while, the best literal translation I could get
\was: "As soon as cold revenge is always served, the dish is very good."
\(that is, assuming -reH means "always" as a verb suffix).
\To make it closer to the translation, I would say:
\bortaS'e' nay' QaQ law' Hoch QaQ puS bIr jablu'DI'.
\
\Comments?
I was just trying to come up with a better translation for this
phrase. What I got out of Okrand's translation is
"The dish is very good when one always serves cold revenge."
The other possibilities seem to stick words in where they might not
make sense in Klingon. To better convey the English meaning, I tried
translating
"Revenge is a dish which is best when one serves it while it is cold."
The relative ordering of the various clauses is complex here, but the main
problem is trying to translate "which is best". The Klingon superlative
construction would require something like "whose good is many [while] all's
good is few"; the problem is there's no "whose" relative conjunction. ("Whose"
as a question word is not a problem, since 'Iv is a noun and can be used in the
possessor-possessed construction). So I stuck with "very good" instead of
"best". The easy part:
Revenge is a dish nay 'oH bortaS'e'
which is best (lit. very good) QaQqu'bogh
when one serves it jablu'DI'
while it is cold bIrtaHvIS
Now, putting it all together in what I think is the proper order:
bIrtaHvIS jablu'DI QaQqu'bogh nay'e' 'oH bortaS'e'
nuq boQub?
--
Mark J. Reed College of Computing Technical Support
<mark@cc.gatech.edu> Georgia Institute of Technology
