[2455] in tlhIngan-Hol
A translation question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Jan 4 21:55:53 1994
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.East.Sun.COM>
From: shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu (Mark E. Shoulson)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.East.Sun.COM>
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 1994 09:47:59 -0500
In-Reply-To: Nick NICHOLAS's message of Tue, 4 Jan 94 13:37:52 EDT <19940104023
7.13566@krang.vis.mu.OZ.AU>
>From: nsn@vis.mu.OZ.AU (Nick NICHOLAS)
>Date: Tue, 4 Jan 94 13:37:52 EDT
>batlh choja', trI'Qal quv:
>If it is, then it's no longer an exclamation, it's an adverb. While majghoS
>has been used for "welcome", I think this is a liberty too great.
"majghoS" for "welcome"? Eww. I don't see any support for this (leaving
aside my surprise that a Klingon would bother with something so solly as
"welcome").
>= Can 'oHtaH be used to mean "it is" in this sense? (The pabpo' invlove
d
>=gave a very emphatic "no" to this question.)
>The anonymous one is right.
Yes, I am. I get that way sometimes. Impersonal "it"s like this are by no
means universal or obvious, and we have no evidence for them in Klingon.
> If it was a phrase in my Shakespeare, I'd treat
>it as:
>ghahlu' tlhIngan'e'; QaQ ghu'vam
>(one is a Klingon; this situation is good).
Erg, I don't much like this, for obscure reasons that I have trouble
backing up. Mostly, I don't like the sound of "?ghaHlu'". I know it's not
properly a passive, but it really should share a lot of passive properties,
and using it this way doesn't seem to work well. I know that "ghaH" is
syntactically transitive, (incidentally, it should be "tlhIngan ghaHlu'" if
anything)... it just doesn't shound right to me yet.
Similarly, I don't much like "?ghaHghach". Sounds like you're trying
awfully hard to make an infinitive for "to be" (or being), and Klingon has
no infinitives. What's worse, the copula is the only Klingon "verb" that
conjugates by changing its basic form, so you don't even have a stem form
to play with.
>What you're really trying to convey is:
>GOOD(KLINGON(X)).
My own attempt was patterned after an Okrandian sentence with a clause as a
subject, expressed elliptically. Okrand says in PK {De' lI' Sovlu'DI' chaq
Do'Ha'} for "knowledge of useful information may be dangerous." This is a
nice way to handle many such situations, I think. Doesn't completely work
here, but with minor modifications...
tlhIngan SoHchugh vaj maj
tlhIngan jIH, vaj maj
and so on. Note the nice thing about this is that I get to use "maj" and
not "QaQ", since the former is an even more "approving" (zabna, for
lojbanists) word.
Many of charghwI''s attempts were really excellent, I thought, and help
stress a point that can't be stressed enough: translating from English to
Klingon is the wrong way to go about it. You have to reconceive the phrase
in Klingon and start from scratch. Unfortunately, from what trI'Qal told
me, the person who started this is somewhat on the pig-headed side and
won't be satisfied with less than "saying just what I said, only in
Klingon." *sigh*.
~mark
