tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Sep 12 16:50:23 2003

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Re: yIchung, yIchung

...Paul ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, Agnieszka Solska wrote:
> From: "...Paul":
> :"Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed
> :overcomes the fear of death"
>
> qaDna' 'oH mu'tlheghvam'e'. Qatlhqu''oH mughmeH Qu'.

I was wondering when someone would pick up this challenge again.  :)

> One way to retain at least the metaphor and the imagery might be to use
> {juS} (overtake, pass) and hope that a Klingon (or a Klingonist) would be
> able to get the intended meaning:
>
> 1: yIchung! yIchung! HeghvIpghach juSjaj
>     Seyqu'moHbogh Do.
>
>    literally:
>
>    Accelerate! Accelerate! May the velocity that
>    really excites overtake the fear of dying.

I particularly like this tact.  I'm not sure about the -jaj, but I think
/HeghvIpghach/ is a perfect translation for "fear of death".  Translating
"the thrill of speed" is tricky, and I'm not convinced the relative clause
works here -- I think you end up with "thrilling speed" (literally, "speed
which excites me").

> What I'm suggesting is putting {-lI'} on the imperative to indicate that the
> action which someone is supposed to do (i.e. going faster, accelerating)
> should continue until a specific point in time, i.e. the moment when that
> someone becomes more thrilled with going fast than afraid of dying :

Hmm...  I'm not sure.  How does /yIchunglI'/ really translate?  "Be
accelerating"?  Actually, the more I think about it, the more I like it...
A more appropriate translation might be "continue accelerating".  But this
also doesn't really indicate what the endpoint is (ie. the "until").

> I'm not saying that these suggestions are better than what other people
> proposed. My examples (2) and (3) might actually be wrong, as there seem to
> be no canonical examples of {-lI'} appearing on imperatives.

I was wondering about that.  I thought there was some rule about that, but
I flipped back through my TKD real quick and didn't see any.  There is a
rule in there about the aspect suffixes, but that's related to sentences
as objects...

How about this take for "the thrill of speed":

yIchung!  yIchung HeghvIpghach jeybe'taHvIS Do SeymoHghach!
"Accelerate!  Accelerate while the excitation of velocity is not
defeating the fear of death!"

/Do SeymoHghach/ is either brilliant, or dumb, and I'm not sure which I'm
feeling today.  :)

...Paul

 **        Have a question that reality just can't answer?        **
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              "I love it when a plan comes together."

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