[1721] in tlhIngan-Hol
First Thoughts and nuqneH
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Oct 18 10:22:21 1993
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.east.sun.com>
From: BELDAR@orange.cc.utexas.edu
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.east.sun.com>
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1993 23:45:50 -0500 (CDT)
X-Envelope-To: tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.east.sun.com
X-Vms-To: IN%"tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.east.sun.com"
Greetings. Having monitored your mailings on the List for the past two weeks,
Inow feel a bit more comfortable with announcing my existance to what appears t
o
be a group of highly motivated and intelligent people concerned (genuinely)
with tlhIngan Hol. I can assure all you that, when I first picked up a copy of
the Klingon Dictionary, I had NO idea others shared my interest...
Tonight, I have but a brief comment and question concerning the recent discuss
ions occurring over the Klingon construction that would best convey "I disagree
with you." To me, this seems to be a resonance of a larger area of debate in
the construction and grammar of tlhIngan (and, indirectly, of English). The
phrase "I disagree with you" is, technically speaking, in the dative case
(assuming that English had one.) In Latin and German, this construction would
be a matter of a thousand curses for students of those languages, each one
having a very distinct case system -- and, unconsciously, I believe the good
man who brought this question up (forgive the temporary loss of his name from
my memory) was falling into a trap that the ambiguity of English has made for
such constructions, especially when translating them into a language such as
tlhIngan, with its out of this world (forgive the pun) treatment of
prepositional and locative concepts. While not trying to disregard his question
,
the thought has occurred to me that, if we consider tlhIngan to be a real
lingual entity, then all of you might be completely wrong about how to
translate this concept-- or any of a hundred others. Consider, for example,
