tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 01 13:48:39 1996
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Re: An offer you shouldn't refuse!
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>Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 08:37:33 -0700
>From: Dave Yeung <[email protected]>
>On Wed, 31 Jul 1996 [email protected] wrote:
>> For your examples, {ghaH vIHar} is good for "I believe him." However, "I
>> believe IN him" is more like saying "I have faith in him," or "I trust him,"
>> which could be rendered {ghaH vIvoq}. (Unless you mean "I believe IN Santa
>> Claus," in which case you've got to find a different way to say it.)
>tlhIngan Hol "Bible" 'ay'Daq mughlu'bogh, Dochvam vIlegh. "John 3:16"Daq
>"believe in him" tu'lu', 'ej {*ghaHDaq Har} ghItlhlu'pu'.
>I saw {*ghaHDaq Har} for "believe in him" in a Klingon translation of a
>portion of the Bible, John 3:16 if I remember correctly, in some
>newspaper a while ago. (The translation was done by someone I think the
>people here called "the unmentionable one"(?))
That would probably be Glen Proechel. I can't speak to why he chose to
translate that way; for all we know it MAY be right. But I tend to doubt
it. In what we've seen of Klingon, -Daq is pretty explicitly used to be
spatial only (cf. qaStaHvIS wa' ram... for "in one night.") Believing IN
someone is a very English-specific idiom. It can mean "trust" (in which
case why not use "voq"?) or "believe that the person exists" (in which case
you should say that as well. This is obviously an idiomatic contraction of
a more complex concept). I don't think you can generalize from English to
Klingon that -Daq should be used in this manner; Glen apparently does.
Your mileage may vary.
>BTW did I put {mughlu'bogh} above in the right place? I seems odd to
>have it following {-Daq}. Also, how would one translate "I believe in
>Santa Claus"? {teH Santa Claus lut 'e' vIHar}? Corrections and advice
>are welcome.
You're running up against a classic problem we've had a long time: you're
trying to use the head-noun of a relative clause as another part of the
matrix sentence, with a type-5 suffix on it. I don't think that can be
done (see the HolQeD interview with Okrand on -bogh). You may have to say
"<Bible> 'ay' mughta'lu', 'ej 'ay'vamDaq..."
"teH S.C. lut 'e' vIHar" is pretty good... or "S.C. tu'lu'bej 'e' vIHar",
etc. You can see from this that "believe in" is a very different creature
from "believe"; it means (in this sense) "believe that X exists". That's
much more than a simple "believe", which leads me to classify it as an
idiom. "Believe in" can also mean "trust", though, for which I'd use
"voq."
~mark
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