tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jun 09 21:20:47 1994
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Satlho'
- From: [email protected] (Nick NICHOLAS)
- Subject: Re: Satlho'
- Date: Fri, 10 Jun 1994 23:17:25 +1000 (EST)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> from "Katrin Erk" at Jun 10, 94 12:09:58 pm
Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Katrin Erk jay'?
=DaH vay' pIm vijatlh vineH: nuqvaD "taH" lo'lu'? loQ muQaHbe'bogh "be
=at a negative angle" jatlh TKD. 'Hamlet'vaD "taH" lo'pu' Nick
=Nicholas: "taH pagh taHbe'" jatlh. 'a qatlh DuH?
"taH pagh taHbe'" mu'tlhegh lupar tlhIngan Hol tej law'qu'. 'a 'oH 'oghpu'
Mark Okrand, ST VI DawI'lutvaD vumtaHvIS. reH mu'ghom 'ay' chu' (Addendum)
lo'nIS je vay', pa' mu'mey chu' law' lutu'lu'mo'. "continue" Qum "taH".
As for my conclusions after being exposed to Klingon... most of the
constructs I've liked were missing, as you've found. I spent a long time
bemoaning Klingon's 'lacks'. Klingon has in fact been a great lesson in
linguistic humility for me; I am now convinced that there is *nothing*
English, or any other language can say, which Klingon can't (given enough
ingenuity and longwindedness). Those long subordinate clauses you have
found so opaque are in fact part of the reason why I feel able to say
this. You're not alone in finding them opaque; they're probably why people
avoid my prose. But given patience enough, they can be parsed (I was
surprised when a Turkish grammar I was reading had a concluding section
on how to parse long sentences in Turkish, but it's the same story ---
we have an unfamiliar language which can have a decent depth of syntactic
complexity, which an expert enough speaker should nonetheless be able to
unravel).
Nick.