[481] in tlhIngan-Hol
Krankor's limerick
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Feb 8 22:27:18 1993
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: mark <mark@dragonsys.COM>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Mon, 08 Feb 93 15:04:42 EST
I enjoyed Krankor's limerick, but I have a few questions and
observations.
In line 2, ghaH, the subject of meqlaHbe', is unnecessary but
perfectly good. At first I wasn't sure which verb it belonged
with, but that cleared up once I looked up QIp "to be stupid",
which can't reasonably take an object (at least not in this
line). Similarly, chaH in line 4, while unnecessary
syntactically, supports the rhyme and meter.
In line 3, chot seems to be used as a noun ("murder is condemned
there", "there [unspecified subject] condemns murder"). But the
dictionary gives chot only as the verb "murder", distinct from the
noun that in English happens to look the same; this looks like a
candidate for the nominalizer, -ghach. The alternative
interpretation, "there one condemns it that he/she murders
him/her", might be grammatical if we take qIch as a verb of saying
(p.67), but I can't make sense of that reading in this context.
If the line were to mean "there it is condemned that they murder
him", or "there it would be condemned if they murdered him", chot
would have to have either a lu- prefix (they-him) or a lu' suffix
(unspec.-him). Or can we "spread" the impersonal lu' from qIch to
chot?
In line 5, batlh is syntactically ambiguous between an adverb
"with honor" and a noun "honor", but the latter reading makes much
more sense. More remarkable is the use of vulqan: it can only
refer to the planet Vulcan, not the inhabitant(s) (also called
Vulcan(s) in English, but unambiguously vulqangan in Klingon), so
we have to read it -- not unreasonably -- as referring to the
society of Vulcan, rather than the physical planet.
Here then is my (totally unpoetic) translation of Capt. Krankor's
poem. Skip this if you'd rather work on it yourself first.
