[86030] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Klingon translation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Fri Jun 26 18:17:28 2009
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:37:08 -0400
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
In-reply-to: <f60fe000906260612y26ce5e3bpe64c88c9d4c82a66@mail.gmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 6/25/09, David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name> wrote:
>
>> Michael Everson wrote:
>>
>>> ’Iv HoS law’ ’Iv HoS puS, ’e’ ghoHtaHvIS SuS bIr Hov je, ghoSpu’
>>> lengwI’. wep tuj tuqtaH ghaH.
>>
>> It looks like you're trying to use {'Iv} as a relative pronoun, but it
>> doesn't work that way. Use /-bogh/ for that sort of thing. But here
>> you're apparently trying to say "arguing about who is stronger." "About"
>> prepositions in English are difficult to translate directly into
>> Klingon; you usually have to split it up into a couple of pieces.
>
> I believe it's from "The North Wind and the Sun", a popular choice of
> translation exercise for conlangs.
>
> And I thought the use of questions as objects ("who is stronger than
> whom? They argue about it.") was a common device for faking relative
> pronouns. It doesn't work like the English syntactically, but it
> conveys the same meaning.
This has been answered in the thirty-some-odd messages since you posted
yours, but I'll just point out that "question as object" is probably the
single most controversial grammatical issue ever raised on this list.
--
SuStel
tlhIngan Hol MUSH
http://trimboli.name/mush
