[868] in tlhIngan-Hol
"to be" again
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Fri May 14 01:50:33 1993
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: (Mark E. Shoulson) <shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Thu, 13 May 93 10:17:02 -0400
In-Reply-To: A.APPLEYARD@fs1.mt.umist.ac.uk's message of 13 May 93 10:07:41 GMT
>From: A.APPLEYARD@fs1.mt.umist.ac.uk
>Date: 13 May 93 10:07:41 GMT
>Priority: normal
>X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail v2.3 (R4).
>Content-Length: 1706
> mark <mark@dragonsys.COM>'s mention of `'aDonay` reminded me of another
>instance of "to be" that looks awkward to translate into Klingon, which (like
>Russian and Arabic and Hebrew and Swahili usually or always do) omits "is/are"
>in the present tense.
> Hebrew's verb "be" (h-y-y, h-w-y) and Arabic's (k-w-n etc) have past and
>future tenses. Hebrew's "be" does have a present tense for use in clarifying
>awkward constructions. E.g.: somewhere in Genesis or Exodus God says something
>like this to (I think it was) Moses when explaining the Divine Name: "`'ehye
>man 'ehye` [= "I am what I am"] ... say to the people `yahwe man yahwe` [= "He
>is what He is"] ...say that `Yahwe'` [= "He who is/exists", a 3rd person
>singular present verb form used as a one-word relative clause] commands
>...".
Actually, to the best of my knowledge, the present participle (used as a
verb) of the Hebrew root "to be" (which, like most "to be" verbs, is
irregular and sorta flipflops between h.y.h. and h.w.h.) is "hovah"
(hovah/hovim/hovot, for the feminine and plural forms). In present tense,
it's *never* used as a copula, but always implies existence. Do not
confuse with a similar, rare root meaning something like "strike", which
gives rise to words like "havot" in Psalms 91:3 ("dever havot", translated
as "noisesome pestilence in the KJV), or "hoyah" in Exodus 9:3 ("yad adonai
hoyah b'mikn'cha", KJV: "the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle")
"'ehyeh" is a verbal form, the future (or properly, imperfective) tense,
and is used as a copula (as here, "I will be what I will be"), where
"hoveh" isn't. I've never heard a good parsing of the tetragrammaton into
a meaningful verb or noun form, though it obviously has some relation to
the verb "to be". In particular, I can't think of any verbal form that
would yield that vocalization in present tense, even given the irregularity
of h.y.h.
Modern Hebrew rarely uses h.y.h. even for existence; it sounds poetic at
least. The more common term would be "kayam", from the k.w.m. root (I
think), meaning "to stand/get up".
> "He is what he is" is as clear in Hebrew as in English, due to presence of a
>verb "be". But it is not as easy in Arabic, which has no present for "be": the
>best that I could manage was `huwa lladhii huwa 'iiyaahu` (dh = English hard
>"th" in "the"; doubled vowel = long), which an Arab student that I knew at the
>time understood, but he called it "very high language ... hard to understand".
>Likewise in Klingon. The best that I can manage is:-
> ghaHbogh jiH jiH = I am what I am
> ghaHbogh ghaH ghaH = He is what He is
> but "He Who Is/Exists" is untranslatable without a verb for "exist", for
>`ghaHbogh` by itself, the nearest that I can manage if the Klingon for "exist"
>is `<null>`, is liable to ambiguity as with `jiH` for "I exist".
I really don't see what's wrong with "tu'lu'". It doesn't mean that
someone actually goes and "finds" the thing, the "-lu'" suffix, while
grammatically implying an indefinate subject, semantically and
pragmatically simply means a passive construction, without necessarily
implying an actor (for a related discussion, see the lojban list. But it's
probably not applicable here). It is no more a problem than the English
"There is a God, but he's nowhere, not in this world" (please don't argue
about the meaning of this sentence, I'm just using it as an example, not
asserting it. You could picture someone saying it, couldn't you?). Taking
the literal translation, you'd ask me how I can say "there is a God", since
I say "there", implying somewhere, and then I say he's not somewhere. The
answer is that in English, "there" is used to indicate existence, not
necessarily actual location. Similarly, Klingon "tu'lu'" implies that the
object is "there" to be found, it doesn't postulate a particular finder.
> What does a Klingon say when needing to pronounce the '=' sign when reading
>an equation? In English '=' is often pronounced "is".
> from: A.APPLEYARD@FS1.MT.UMIST.AC.UK
I'd guess a pronoun used as a verb, or maybe something with "rap".
~mark
