tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Dec 25 10:00:25 1998
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Re: chorgh tagh 'uQ'a'?
>[email protected] writes:
>
><< chorgh tagh 'uQ'a'? 'Iw HIvje' wItlhutlhrup.
>
>I get "The banquet initiates eight [of them] (with a question mark instead of
>a verb suffix to show that the sentence is a question)? We are ready to drink
>a cup of blood."
>
>Have I interpreted your post correctly or am I missing something, such as the
>possibility that {chorgh} s/b {ghorgh}?
>
>peHruS
Damn my faulty memory: {chorgh} indeed! Now you all see why I will never
be asked to be a BG. The line should read:
ghorgh tagh 'uQ'a'? 'Iw HIvje' wItlhutlhrup.
When will the banquet begin? We are ready to drink the cup of blood.
I was struck by the analogy of the coming hopeless battle to a feast. I
wonder if "drinking the cup of blood" was a Tataro-Mongol idiom for
martyrdom.
For those unfamiliar with the siege of Kazan, Muscovite forces in 1552
killed all its male inhabitants/defenders and deported the surviving women
and children as slaves. In fact, the famous St. Basil's cathedral in Red
Square in Moscow was built by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate the final
conquest of this Muslim city, which was repopulated with Russian settlers
to become an administrative center for the new province. Nowadays, Kazan
is the capital of the self-proclaimed Republic of Tatarstan.
Voragh