tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 19 13:48:43 2001
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Re: QamvIS Hegh, torvIS yIn
> QamvIS Hegh qaq law, torvIS yIn qaq puS.
"Better to die on our feet than live on our knees." ST6
SuStel:
: This is a really weird sentence. What is it doing? Are /Hegh/ and /yIn/
: nouns or verbs? If nouns, the law'/puS construction isn't too strange, but
: the you've got a subordinate clause modifying a noun, not a verb. If they
: are verbs, then the subordinate clauses work, but the law'/puS is wrong.
Although Okrand analyzed it as:
"Dying while standing is preferable to living while kneeling"
in TKW (p.95), it makes more sense to me viewing them as nouns:
"Death while standing is preferable to life while kneeling"
: And either way we're missing two /-taH/ suffixes!
Okrand goes on to say:
"The grammatical construction is a bit aberrant; one would
expect {QamtaHvIS} and {tortaHvIS}. In proverbs, grammatical
shortcuts are not uncommon."
: Thank goodness this is a proverb, and we can explain it away as
: grammar that "doesn't count."
A better working explanation is that this proverb contains a survival of how
{-vIS} worked in older Klingon, before Klingons started adding {-taH} to it,
for reasons which are still unexplained.
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons