tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 15 07:23:01 1993
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Klingon translation of "Jonah"
>From: [email protected]
>Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1993 18:34:33 -0400 (EDT)
>Well, I've just perused and scrutinized MarkShoulson's Klingon translation
>of the book of "Jonah", and I'm glad to say I was not disappointed. It was
>remarkably clear and for the most part, the grammar was quite accurate.
>Some points that cam to mind in reading thru your translation are noteworthy
>on this list.
Thanks for getting started on the critique! I was hopinh for some good
feedback so I could fine-tune the thing. Over the weekend I noticed
something wrong: In the first line of the fourth chapter, I have {'ach
belHa'qu'moH yona}. This is either a word-order problem (yona should come
first, since [it] displeased him) or a superfluous "-moH" (yona wqas
displeased). I'm going with the second, and blowing out that "-moH".
>First off, {SuH yIHu'}, which comes up frequently, I would have translated
>as {yIHu'rup}. But mayber that's among the less-than-noteworthy points. Oh
>well.
Hmmm. Point taken. The {SuH} is in most cases my own interpolation,
actually, just because there's a command coming up. The "yIHu'", however,
is in the text. It may be that I should take the "yIHu'" as idiomatic for
just "SuH" or something.
>In your intro, you said something about your uncertainty on how appositives wor
>k
>in Klingon. One of these at the beginning is {nInveyDaq
>veng tInDaq}. No punctuation or nothing. But I think if Klingon does have
>appositives, they might not function too far off from this construction.
Yeah, like I said I don't have much to go on. As far as the punctuation
goes, it's been pointed out here already that the canon doesn't use
punctuation, but rather it's a convention of the list. As such, I don't
claim even to be consistent with it (though I try). The punctuation is
there just as an aid to the writer and possibly the reader and should not
be considered to affect the meaning at all. If you can grok {nInveyDaq
veng tInDaq} at all, great, but if it *must* be punctuated, then maybe
we're on the wrong track.
>One thing I noticed is the absence of any Type 7 Verb Suffixes used outside
>dialog. At first I dismissed this as unimportant (and probably attributable
>to laziness or obsession with minimizing cumbersomeness), but as I thought
>about it, I thought, "Hey, Klingon really has no past tense. So when telling
>stories, why _would_ you used aspect markers. The difference between the
>perfect and imperfect tense in Indo-European Languages is probably a close
>parallel to perfective aspect and (implicit) past tense in Klingon.
>So in "narrative past tense," no Type 7 Suffix is used, most likely.
>But this does raise another rather important point: I noticed a few sentences
>that (believe it or not) carried a pluperfect connotaton, which is kind of
>like a 'secondary past' or imperfect+perfect. Thus one of the perfective
>suffixes is probably appropriate there. E.G.:
>"I was not able to murder him, since someone had hid all my weapons."
>{vIchotlaHbe' nuHwIj Hoch luSo'moHlu'*pu'*mo'}
Type 7 Suffixes aren't completely absent outside of dialogue. As I said in
my introduction, I tried very hard to use them *correctly*, and not put
them on superfluously. So you have in the first chapter {joH'a'vo' Haw'
'e' luSovmo', chaHvaD ja'ta'mo'} for "For they knew was was fleeing from
before God, for he [*had*] told them", for an example of the pluperfect
situations you mention.
Klingon type 7 suffixes are *not* equivalent to IE tenses (past, present,
future). They are, as you say, perfective and imperfective (see Section
4.2.7, where Okrand says that Klingon does "indicate... whether an action
is completed or not yet completed." (i.e. perfective aspects) When telling
a narrative, you're in "story time", as it were, and using "-pu'" puts
actions further back, saying they are completed and done by the time we're
talking about. Things were made a little easier for me because Biblical
Hebrew tends to use different constructions for past and perfective. So I
could work from the text and determine when it meant to use what (which is
why in Jonah's prayer it says {joH'a'vaD jIjachpu'}: the Hebrew has the
perfective there (and in fact there are commentaries about it, saying
things like Jonah's faith was so perfect that it might as well have
happened so far as he was concerned, and other theories). So your analysis
is correct: I didn't leave off the type 7's cavalierly, I was working from
the same ideas you were: that they indicate *aspect* not *tense* (See
section 4.2.7 again, section heading.)
>I believe you also said in your intro that you were uncertain how to
>write something for "be scared"
>so you chose {ghIjlu'}. Well, you may not have noticed that there is a word
>{Haj} for "to dread," which in some respect carries an equal semantic value
>to "be scared."~eSx<.^
>vJNEr*xv:
>So maybe you could've said {Haj beq} instead of {beq ghIjlu'}.
Aha! Thank you! Much better.
>Some of these non-canon words (or maybe you could call them "unobvious
>compounds") are confusing. {toDghach} for "salvation" totally threw me
>off; I had to go back and compare it directly to the English text. I have
>no clue as to where you came up with {qa'} for "soul, spirit." Also,
>what do you mean by {ramwI'}. Peasant? I dunno.
>Other than these, I have no credible complaints.
Well, I didn't have much to go on. {toDghach} is really all I could think
of for the concept, given the word-stock we had. {qa'} is a brand-new word
from Power Klingon, from a toast about the spirit of Kahless living in you
({SoHDaq qeylIS qa' yInjaj}). New, but canon. {ramwI'} was sorta
"peasant"; the verse was an attempt to translate a sentence saying "From
their big [ones] to their small [ones]", meaning the important and
unimportant, the noble and the vulgar and everyone in-between. There
should be a better way.
>You seemed to have a problem with north, south, east, and west. You wrote
>{veng 'et[????]Daq}, when your meaning was "east of the city." Or maybe
>it was north. I'd have to re-refer to the English Scripture. Anyways,
>maybe you could try {veng retlhDaq} or {veng HurDaq} and leave the exact
>direction vague.
The Hebrew has "east", but as I said in my introduction, Biblical terms for
"east" often (as here) are from roots meaning "forward", so lacking any way
to indicate compass directions apart from "fore/aft/left/right" I picked
east as the "forward" (for Biblical usage, at any rate). Leaving out the
direction altogether would bother me, I think, since it goes against my
literal translation style, and leaves out something that was in the text.
>Near the end, I cam across, {cha'netlh nuv} in the last sentence. The
>actual KJV Scripture reads "six score thousand." With a little finger
>(and toe) math and some zero-annexation, six score thousand comes out
>Try {wa'bIp cha'netlh}. Altho the numbers aren't really consequential,
>I just decided to make a point of that.
*BLAH*. I can't believe I did that. The Hebrew clearly says "twelve
myriads" (an unusal way of putting it in Hebrew also, btw), but in my
haste, I read "two myriads." I *could* use {?wa'maH cha'netlh}, to
parallel the construction (as Okrand did in the time section of CK), but I
don't think that's called for; the KJV used the terminology it felt was
more current (or at any rate appropriate), so I'll take our suggestion and
make it {wa'bIp cha'netlh}. reH Suvrup SuvwI''a'.
Keep those comments a-coming!
>Guido#1, Leader of All Guidos
~mark