tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Oct 21 09:49:33 1996
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Re: "The ship is made of metal"
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>Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 17:39:01 -0700
>From: "Adrian Kubala" <[email protected]>
>>Adrian K writes:
>>>I am relatively new to Klingon, but it seems that there is a better
>>>translation than the cumbersome one offered by Mark Shoulson.
>>Cumbersome? Maybe I'm just used to the way we've historically said
>>things like this, but "metal is used to make the ship's hull" seems
>>right on target to me.
>>Because there isn't a word for "be made of" or "make up" in the dictionary,
>>I can't find a better way to say it than the sentence ~mark suggested.
>>"In order to cause the ship's hull to take form, one used metal." Perhaps
>>it looks cumbersome in English, but it seems perfectly natural :) to me in
>>Klingon.
>When I said "cumbersome" I guess I really meant it seems kind of roundabout.
>It seems to me that a language that has been in use, supposedly, for a
>thousand years or so would have evolved a more direct way of stating the
>"made of" concept, even if we can't use it as cannon yet. I thought
Oh, wouldn't be too sure. Welsh has been around for a long time, and "the
toy is made of wood" in Welsh (Mae'r tegan wedi'e neud o bren" translates
literally to "the toy is after its making of wood." Even the English isn't
very far from the Klingon I gave. "Is made of" is a passive construction
(made by...?)--Klingon doesn't have a true passive, it uses the impersonal
in -lu' for many such situations (as I used it here). "Of metal" is a
prepositional phrase. Klingon doesn't have prepositions as such; they are
expressed with type-5 noun suffixes or subordinate clauses (with type-9
verb suffixes) most of the time. And indeed that's just what I did. There
is no instrumental case in Klingon; I used "lo'" for that, since that's
what it means. True, I inverted the main and subordinate clause with
respect to English, but that also happens a lot ("your mother has a smooth
forehead" becomes "your mother's forehead is smooth": the adjective becomes
the main verb).
>equivalency. Incidentaly, I looked through TKD for a translation of 'oH, but
>all I came up with is the pronoun. I also checked the KLI's list of new
>words not in TKD. Can someone give me a formal definition or lead me to one?
It's in TKD, page 51. It's a pronoun. It means "it."
~mark
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