tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Sep 22 16:20:13 2000

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

RE: [KLBC] A question of translation


> B'Tana Qul mupwI' said:
> 
> Greetings everyone,
> I am in a SIMM and there is one person who claims the blue, bold
> statement is the translation of "loghDaq Suvrupbogh SuvwI'pu' chah Hoch
> SuvwI'pu''e' "(In space, all warriors are cold warriors.)
> 
My email program doesn't show any of your text as blue or bold, so it looks
like the formatting you used wasn't successfully received.
In the book The Klingon Way, I believe that Okrand does translate {loghDaq
Suvrupbogh SuvwI'pu' chaH Hoch
> SuvwI'pu''e'} as "In space, all warriors are cold warriors". However, this
> isn't a literal translation. {Suvrupbogh SuvwI'pu'} literally is
> "Fighters/warriors which are ready to fight", rather than "cold warriors".
> 
> 
> "Revenge is a dish best served cold and its very cold in space"
> 
> I have attempted to translate the statement, but I am not sure if I am
> correct, so could you please help me out?
> "Revenge is a dish best served cold and its very cold in space" would
> translate roughly to "bortaS bIr jablu'DI'reH QaQqu' nay', loghDaq bIr'a'
> 'ej"?  The last part about "it is very cold in space" is where I'm not
> sure (considering the first sentence in there is already done for me.
> <grin>)
> 
Actually, there's a typo in TKD. There should be a space in the first
sentence, between {jablu'DI'} and {reH}. So the two separate parts of the
first sentence are:
{bortaS bIr jablu'DI'} "When cold revenge is served,"
{reH QaQqu' nay'} "The dish is always very good"

You made a good try on the second part. There are a few problems with it,
though.
Since you are connecting two sentences together, {'ej} is the correct
conjunction to use. However, unlike {je}, {'ej} goes between the two things
you are connecting. For example:
{Suv, 'ej QeH} "She fights, and she is angry."

When you said {bIr'a'}, what you were trying to do was to make {bIr} more
important with the augmentative suffix {-'a'}. However, the augmentative
{-'a'} is a type-1 noun suffix, not a verb suffix. So you can use {-'a'} on
nouns to make them more important, such as {'uQ} ("dinner") and {'uQ'a'}
("banquet, feast"). However, since {bIr} is a verb, you can't use {bIr'a'}
to mean "it is very cold".
(There is a similarly spelled verb-suffix {-'a'}, but it has a totally
different meaning, which is explained on page 44 of TKD.)

So, how can we say "it is very cold"? Some verb suffixes that you might want
to use are {-qu'}, {-bej}, or {-chu'}:

{bIrqu'} "It is very cold"
{bIrbej} "It is definitely cold"
{bIrchu'} "It is perfectly cold"

So for "Revenge is a dish best served cold and it's very cold in space", you
could say:
{bortaS bIr jablu'DI', reH QaQqu' nay', 'ej loghDaq bIrchu'}
which is literally
"When cold revenge is served, the dish is always very good, and in space it
(presumably the revenge) is perfectly/utterly cold".

- taD

Back to archive top level