tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 02 13:38:12 1995
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- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: [none]
- Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 13:38:12 -0400
>(message from Laurel Beckley on Tue, 1 Aug 1995 19:31:37 -0400 (EDT))
Subject: Re: }} KLBC
>Date: Tue, 1 Aug 1995 19:31:37 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Laurel Beckley <[email protected]>
>Ok, I just wrote a message about pets are everywhere, and realized I've
>left out the verb. How do you say are? I'm finding a lot of trouble
>finding some English words that have no klingon counterpart. Are is one
>of them. How do you say "pets are everywhere"? Sorry if I sound
>confused, but I am. Ok, I'll stop here.
You're in trouble in the first place if you think in terms of "finding
words" for their "counterparts" in English or Klingon. That's not how
translation works. charghwI' has a wonderful analogy, in which he compares
a sentence to a jigsaw puzzle and the words to pieces. You will not
succeed if you take each English piece and root around for a Klingon piece
that looks the same: Klingon pieces and English pieces simply are cut
differently. What you must do is start from the whole picture, gluing it
back together until it's whole, and the cut it up again into Klingon
pieces.
I think using "bIH" is unidiomatic for Klingon. The more natural way to
say it is "Dat Sajmey lutu'lu'", using the idiom for "there are" described
in TKD.
~mark