tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 10 08:34:18 2006

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RE: [Klingon_Language] (unknown)

Russ Perry Jr ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

Steven Boozer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Voragh:
>>>> So with those examples in mind, how would you render the
>>>> difference between:
>>>>
>>>>    "Kruge killed the traitor with his (i.e. Kruge's) knife."
>>>>    "Kruge killed the traitor with his own (i.e. the traitor's) knife."
>>>>
>>>> {tajDaj} "his knife" alone is ambiguous.  One could always repeat the
>>>> noun - {Qugh taj} "Kruge's knife" vs. {maghwI' taj} "the traitor's
>>>> knife" - but I don't think this captures the irony (or justice?) of
>>>> the second.

> DloraH:
>>> Without the (), the english is just as ambiguous.

> Russ Perry Jr:
>> While grammatically both sentences are ambiguous (possibly excepting
>> if you knew the traitor was female), I think most English speakers
>> will tend to perceive the sentence having "his knife" to imply Kruge,
>> and even more so the sentence having "his own knife" to imply the
>> traitor, as the owner of the knife, respectively.  This distinction,
>> I believe, is what the original poster meant (specifically that "his"
>> vs "his own" tends to disambiguate on a perception/assumption level,
>> not a grammatical one).

> That's exactly it.  Absent any other context, I would naturally assume that 
> "his own" referred to the traitor, not Kruge.  (I'm not sure why - perhaps 
> because "his own" is closer to the word "traitor" in the sentence?)

I believe it's more due to the expectation.  If Kruge and the traitor are fighting, and the traitor is killed with a knife, the normal expectation
would be that the victor, Kruge, owned the knife that did the deed.  The
"own" implies that it is unexpectedly the traitor's because otherwise the
word is redundant and most often left out.  The flipside is that without
a word like "own", the sentence enforces that expectation that it was
Kruge's knife that killed the traitor.  So in this case, ambiguity is
essentially -- but potentially incorrectly -- minimized by expectation.

> Another example to ponder:  my computer at work (the one I use) vs. my own 
> computer at home (the one I actually own and may have brought to 
> work).  Here the distinction is clearly one of personal property; i.e. to 
> own something.

In English, I would expect that if the gist of the text were about a work
setting and you said "my own computer", "own" would again indicate something
out of the ordinary, but it's less effective here because you could use
your coworker's computer to do something instead of your own (work)
computer; in fact in some offices only a few people have "their own"
computers, and the majority use whatever workstation is available where
they can find a seat.

But I have no idea what problems and solutions you may come across in
trying to translate these ideas into Klingon, sorry.
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