[83978] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Missing question words
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Tue Jan 15 00:01:33 2008
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:57:37 -0500
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
In-reply-to: <1147AE75-1971-4319-AE7F-46814DAAD8E5@insightbb.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Alan Anderson wrote:
> On Jan 14, 2008, at 1:50 PM, David Trimboli wrote:
>
>> QuchtaHghach 'ar Daghaj?
>> How much continued happiness do you have?
>>
>> ... Without a Happy Meter (TM), we cannot expect a direct answer to
>> this question....
>>
>> These are all perfectly valid workarounds, but they don't actually ask
>> "How happy are you?"
>
> It appears to me that the lack of a customary measurement of
> happiness precludes a direct answer to the question in English as well.
>
> I'm unsure why you seem unsatisfied with having to recast the
> question. Direct translation is unavailable in many cases, and we
> have a number of Okrandian descriptions of rephrasing questions like
> "which month is your favorite?" and "what time is it?"
You clipped the part where I talked about how much of a recast we're
dealing with. There's changing the syntax of a sentence, and then
there's completely changing the meaning of the sentence to elicit the
desired response.
I am not unsatisfied with recasting. As I said, it's a perfectly valid
workaround. What I'm not satisfied with is avoiding admitting "You can't
say that" when presenting a recast.
How do you say "How loyal is the captain?" You can't. But you CAN say
{Qu'vaD matlh'a' HoD} "Is the captain loyal for the mission?" or a
number of other alternatives. But you can't ask exactly the question you
wanted to ask. You MUST change the question's meaning in some way to get
your listener to answer the way you want. This is more than casting
"Which month is your favorite?" as {jar DamaSbogh yIngu'}, which, though
the grammar is different, still contains all the concepts of the English
original: month, preference, you, and tell-me-which-one. And it's
different from expressing a concept with an idiom, which is, by
definition, avoiding directly addressing the concept in the first place.
I guess my reaction is much like the reaction I have when browsing the
Thunderbird newsgroup at Mozilla. "How can I keep all my watched threads
at the top?" is a common question. Mozilla fanatics and developers
usually answer, "View | Threads | Watched Threads with Unread." But this
doesn't put watched threads at the top of the list; it hides everything
but threads with unread messages. The correct answer to the question is
"You can't do that." The suggestions given by the Mozilla fans are
workarounds and alternatives, which are fine, but not the correct answer
to the question. They attempt to provide a solution to the questioner
without first mentioning that Thunderbird simply can't do what they
asked about. That little admission would make me feel better.
So when I say phrases like "How loyal is the captain?" are troublesome
for us, I mean that the essential concept of the sentence cannot be
directly expressed as-is. (I used the word "directly" several times.)
Pointing out alternative ways to get the answer you're looking for makes
me say, "Yes, I KNOW I can ask that different question to get the
answer. That's self-evident, and it's not the point." This wasn't a
conversation brought up by someone stuck on a particular phrase; the
conversation was about whether certain English phrases have more or less
direct Klingon equivalent. The answer is "No, they don't, but here's a
different way you can say your example sentences." If it was simply
someone looking for a little help translating something, by all means
tell them, "Don't try to say it like that; say it like this instead."
SuStel
Stardate 8038.8
--
Practice the Klingon language on the tlhIngan Hol MUSH.
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