tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 30 09:13:17 1995
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Re: (n) orbit?
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: (n) orbit?
- Date: Mon, 30 Jan 95 12:13:13 EST
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "A.Appleyard" at Jan 30, 95 4:12 am
According to A.Appleyard:
>
> HoD trI'Qal <[email protected]> wrote:-
>
> > ... <bav> means "to orbit". Notice it does *not* mean "to be in orbit", as
> > you translated here ...
>
> But surely, if X is orbiting Y, then X is in orbit round Y??? It seems that
> state verbs and action verbs merge indefinitely into each other.
When I hear "X orbits Y", I see a moving image of X DOING
something. That is very Klingon.
When I hear "X is in orbit around Y", I see a still photograph
of X and Y with a magic marker line forming an elipse around Y
which intersects X. Not a very Klingon image.
While it is true that stative verbs have their place in the
Klingon language, it takes a human to take a perfectly good
active verb and try to transmogrify it into a stative one. This
perverse activity often results in very bad writing, thus
stubborn attempts to use the verb {bav} as an adjectival,
despite an impressive roster of Klingonists who have been
willing to repeatedly explain why it is wrong, despite the
excellent explanations that were given and ignored earlier.
charghwI'
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