[850] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Suggestions for Marc Okrand: homophones
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu May 13 08:04:21 1993
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Captain Krankor <krankor@codex.prds.cdx.mot.com>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Wed, 12 May 93 18:52:26 -0400
> >> There should be a Klingon verb for "exist".
> > ... ours is a loan word (from Latin), not native. I suspect that when a
>Klingon needs to talk about something existing without specifying anything
>else about it he uses tu'lu'.
> `tu'lu'` = "one finds it". What if the object is hidden too well to be found
>just now, but yet exists somewhere? Native English <does> have expressions for
>"exist": "is there", "is real", etc, as well as, like Latin and Greek, using
>the verb "to be". But Klingon has no verb "to be" to use this way, so needs a
>separate word for "exist".
As far as I can tell, tu'lu' is an idiom, and it is not relevant
whether or not the thing is hidden. Even taken literally, the -lu'
doesn't specify *who* could find it; the fact that the speaker is
making the statement means he believes the thing is there to be
found. This is so even if his statement is completely fallacious,
like, oh, something about Invisible Floating Pink Elephants, which I
shall abbreviate as IFPE:
Qe'Daq IFPE tu'lu'! "There are IFPE in the restaurant!"
It might be useful to have a word for "to exist", but it does not
follow that the language "needs" it. It is not the case that every
language must have a word corresponding to every concept. There is
no direct English word for the French "falloir" [sp? I'm talking
about "il faut"] nor French word for the English "fun" (at least
none that my French teacher could ever tell me), yet both languages
have done just fine. I don't think "exist" is a sufficiently
fundamental, core, really-hard-to-get-by-without kind of thing to
call it a need. [Unless, of course, you are a Klingon devotee of
the philosophy of Ayn Rand, in which case you'll have serious
trouble saying "Existance exists." {{:-)]
> > ... Last Friday night in synagogue in meditation/ prayer I thought/prayed,
in Klingon: 'aDonay, Datu'lu''a'? qatu'laH'a'?
> My analyser makes this of it:-
>---- * 'aDonay ---- /*** error. What is the intended meaning? ***/
># N:vein <o> V:marry_of_wife
># C:[but|nevertheless|even_so|however] V:be_parallel_with <ay>
># C:[but|nevertheless|even_so|however] N:velocity V:marry_of_wife
Well he explained it further down! It is an interesting problem,
actually, how to use *Hebrew* words in Klingon, lacking Hebrew
characters. It isn't clear that transliterating into Klingon is
any more wrong than transliterating into English. {{:-) But, even
though the transliterated English may also not be readily
comprehendable, it will at least not look like Klingon and be more
readily flagged as an unknown word, and some English
transliterations are common enough to be recognizable, so I'd say
that, as a general rule, words from non-roman-alphabet languages
should be spelled out in their normal transliteration, not in
Klingon.
--Krankor
