tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 07 17:29:26 1995
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Re: TLHINGAN-HOL digest 103
On Tue, 7 Feb 1995 [email protected] wrote:
>
> Date: Tue, 7 Feb 95 9:51:57 EST
> From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Multiple subordinate or Relative Clauses
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
>
> According to Christopher M. Dicely:
> >
> > How do you construct a sequence of subordinate or relative clauses in
> > tlhIngan Hol, or is there
> > even a way to do this? Specifically, I was trying to translate the preamble
> > to the US Constitution,
> > and the US Declaration of Independence, and in both ran into what seemed to
> > be a nasty situation...
>
> There is no easy way to handle this, except to take Okrand at
> his word when he explained that often a single sentence in
> English would be translated into more than one sentence in
> Klingon. He was specifically speaking on "sentence as object"
> constructions, but I have long felt that this should be true
> for such pompous and rambling works as you have described.
The problem is that the you end up with an enormously awkward
and tediously repetitive structure if (in the case of the
preamble) you take a sentence that says "In order to do A,B,C,D,
and E, we do X and Y to Z" and turn it into:
In order to do A we do X to Z and we do Y to Z
In order to do B we do X to Z and we do Y to Z
etc.
I was hoping there would be someway around that that was valid in
tlhIngan Hol as there have (apparently) been some Okrand extensions
since TKD...
>
> Don't get me wrong. I strongly approve of these documents. I'm
> glad they happened. I just think the form of the language is
> perverse in its efforts to overstuff every sentence as if the
> complexity beyond necessity could somehow make the document
> more meaningful.
>
> It's the way committees write. Individuals don't write like
> that.
This I take exception to. I have found many times when the best way
to convey a complex concept required multiple qualifying clauses. Not
everything is simple enough to fit into an easy-to-translate sentence.
> Klingons don't write in committees. Face it. If they
> tried, then someone would suggest adding one phrase too many
> and the original author of the sentence would pull out a
> disruptor and edit the committee.
True.
Chris