tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 14 17:16:15 1996
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Re: thursday:today
- From: "Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: thursday:today
- Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 17:16:15 -0700
> Mark J. Reed writes
>
> >tlhIngan Hol lo'be' lutDaj. tlhIngan Hol qelbe' lutDaj. qatlh maHvaD
> >Daja'?
Ken Traft writes:
> I translate this as:
> His story does not use Klingon. His story does not consider Klingon. Why
> did you tell it to us?
>
> I note a change in tense in the last sentence. He used third person in the
> first two sentences and then switched to second person. Since the "focus" of
> the letter was to all of us it seems he should keep third person in his final
> sentence qatlh maHvaD ja'.
I have to disagree. Klingon doesn't have tense (and no, I dont' want to get
into that whole can of qagh, check the archives if any of you want to read about
the whole TENSE vs. ASPECT threads), and I could just as easily have translated
that last sentence as "Why does he tell it to us?" still in the present tense in
English.
As for the switch to second person in the third sentence, I agree it too should
be in third person. However, there is some ambiguity here with the switch from
one third person subject to another. With the first two subjects having been
"his story" your suggestion of <<qatlh maHvaD ja'>> might reasonably be read
with more consistency as "why does the story tell/report to us?" rather than
"why does he tell/report it to us?" This doesn't feel too good though. It's a
nice example sentence though because if you want the first meeting it's a nifty
place to use a Type 1 verb suffix
<<qatlh maHvaD ja''egh>> why does the story tell/report itself to us?)
or if you want the second reading you can nicely illustrate the Type 5 noun
suffix for topics
<<qatlh maHvaD ja' ghaH'e'>>
> I did like the story!
I did too, Ken, but I also have to agree that it without some Klingon relevance
it was just a waste of bandwidth (okay, I'll ammend that, an *amusing* waste of
bandwidth).
Lawrence
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