tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Sep 25 22:09:22 1997
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Re: KLBC: to be or not to be
ja' muHwI':
>{vutwI' 'oH vutbogh loD'e'} (A cook is a man that cooks.)
>Is that correct?
The way I interpret pronouns-as-"to be"-verbs, your translation is
backwards. {X 'oH Y'e'} doesn't mean the same as {Y 'oH X'e'}. It's
the same sort of distinction between "a square is a rectangle" (true)
and "a rectangle is a square" (false).
Your Klingon sentence is nearly correct; the pronoun should really be
{ghaH}, not {'oH}. After making the substitution, I would translate it
literally as "As for a man who cooks, he is a cook." But you've said it
the other way around in English, which is not accurate. Not all cooks
are men; {vutbogh loD ghaH vutwI''e'} isn't true.
ja' Qov:
> You'd be in trouble if you tried to say "lunch is the dish the man
> prepares" with this construction, but as long as the type 5 noun
> suffix falls on the noun that is the head of the relative clause,
> this works.
ja'qa' muHwI':
>So you mean this is incorrect? (it does sound weird, though)
>--> {megh 'oH nay''e' vutbogh loD}
Again, it looks backwards to me. "As for the dish which the man prepares,
it is lunch." "Lunch" is the subject in the Qov's sentence; if I *had* to
say it in Klingon, it would come out {nay' vutbogh loD 'oH megh'e'}. And
there's no need to use another {-'e'} on {nay'} to avoid ambiguity here;
the head noun of the relative clause is a thing, not a person, because the
"to be" pronoun/verb is "it".
But I agree with Qov: {megh vut loD} is much more straightforward.