tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 04 10:35:39 2000
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Re: muSHa'ghach
pIl'o':
> "muSHa'ghach? muSHa'ghach? aha! so there IS a noun
> for it! I knew it! I knew it! muSHa'ghach!!!!"
ja' StaZ:
> I am not familiar with ghach. muSHa' would be love... and in
> knowing Hamlet and the Soliloquy, I can only think it is Despised Love.
Or "un-hate". Remember {-Ha'} also un-does an action. Here perhaps: hate
{muS} turned to love? I don't have the play in front of me right now; how does
SeQpIr use the word in context?
qa'ral:
: I admittedly haven't a canon leg to stand on, but {muSHa'ghach} is
: appealing to me not only for its lovely rasp but also for its derivative,
: indirect construction. In order to approximate the most basic of words in
: DIvI' Hol, Klingons take a radically different concept and add two suffixes
: to twist it into shape.
yemej:
> in DS9: Searching for parmach, you see that parmach, roughly translated,
means love
> but with a more aggressive overtone.
qa'ral again:
: Good point. You have to wonder why the immortal *qonwI'* didn't use *parmaq*.
1) Because "love" can cover a wide range of meaning? In context, {parmaq} may
be closer to "lust", while *{muSHa'ghach} may tend toward "affection" (which
BTW also has the fancy derived latinate suffix -tion, a nice analog to
Klingon's {-ghach}).
2) For the extra syllable? Or the rhyme? Don't forget that "Hamlet" is poetry
and Nick et al. may have been trying to retain the scansion. Whether they were
successful I'll leave for others as I have no ear for poetry in any language.
(When people criticise Klingon translations of Shakespeare they tend to
narrowly focus on vocabulary and grammar and forget all about the poetic
element, which has to be rendered as well.)
Of course, the real life reason Nick didn't use {parmaq} was probably that we
didn't have this word yet back when he first translated that most famous of
soliloquies.
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons