tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 02 07:44:48 1995
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Re: how to thank
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: how to thank
- Date: Thu, 2 Feb 95 10:44:43 EST
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "Alan Anderson" at Feb 2, 95 6:55 am
According to Alan Anderson:
>
> When I wanted to thank ~mark for the information he gave me, I started with the
> English "Thanks for the info." Casting that into the {thlIngan mu'tay'}, I got
> "I thank you for the information" -> "for-information I-thank-you." Except
> that I wasn't sure "for" is really what I want here.
Excellent! This is EXACTLY the kind of thinking through the
MEANING of your text that a good translation requires. The
{-vaD} suffix does mean, "for", but if you look more closely at
the description in TKD 3.3.5, you see that it implies that the
noun is somehow the beneficiary of the action. The action is
being done "for" the person or thing with the {-vaD} suffix.
Going the lazy route and just saying, "I thank you for the
information," and replacing "for" with {-vaD} does not really
result in a meaningful conveyance of your English sentence into
Klingon.
> Maybe I should instead
> use "because of" to get "because-of-information I-thank-you." I wasn't sure how
> to correctly translate the idea. In this case, I was grateful for the /receipt/
> of the information, so I rewordedthe English as
> "I thank (you = ~mark) because you gave the information to me."
> This is a precise way to say what I wanted to say, so that's what I translated
> into {thlIngan Hol}: {De' chonobmo' ~mark qatlho'neS.}
MUCH better! The only think I feel a little shaky about is the
use of "~mark", which, like any explicit noun, is third person,
in the explicit object position while your prefix indicates a
second person object. Maybe it works just like you intend it
to, but I can't be sure. I think what you are doing is referred
to in linguistic terms as "apposition". "I thank you, ~mark."
Here, "you" and "~mark" are essentially restatements of a
reference to the same person. Okrand doesn't tell us how to do
that in Klingon. The way you do it does make sense, if it is
legal to do it at all, but I think this is the kind of thing we
should check with Okrand before we get in too much of a habit
of doing frequently.
Apposition has been on the short list for Okrand for a long
time. In particular, it is closely related to proper use of the
verb {pong}, since "Klingons call me charghwI'" is a statement
in which "me" and "charghwI'" are restatements of the same
entity with two different nouns. I hope we have an answer on
this one within the next year. For now, I'd work around this
with:
~markvaD vIjatlh. De' chonobmo' qatlho'.
> But what if I'm grateful simply for the /existence/ of something? I might want
> to express something like "Thanks for the water." {bIQmo' qatlho', qar'a'?}
Well thought out. This is exactly how I would say it.
> -- ghunchu'wI'
>
>
charghwI'
--
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