tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 26 09:45:36 2009
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Re: Klingon translation
On 26 Jun 2009, at 15:21, ghunchu'wI' 'utlh wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Mark J. Reed<[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>
>> And I thought the use of questions as objects ("who is stronger
>> than whom? They argue about it.") was a common device for faking
>> relative
>> pronouns.
>
> It's common enough among people trying to translate into Klingon. It
> is not common in canon. It is, in fact, entirely absent from canon.
So... one has to read everything in canon before .... naaah.
> I apologize for not having a reference handy, but I recall Okrand
> telling us explicitly that questions are not used as objects in
> Klingon.
I can't be expected to know this. I have TKD and KGT and a list of
Words Not In TKD from 1997.
> He didn't close the door completely on the idea, saying that he
> didn't have enough information to tell whether or not question words
> could be used like English relative pronouns...but he has
> consistently rejected all opportunities to do so, choosing instead
> other methods to express the idea.
"Other methods".
>> It doesn't work like the English syntactically, but it conveys the
>> same meaning.
>
> I do not believe it conveys the meaning desired. I am not convinced
> that it carries any valid meaning at all. In my dictionary, the
> pronoun {'e'} stands for the previous sentence, not for a
> hypothetical meta-answer to an indirect question.
"The previous sentence" must be a declarative sentence, and cannot be
a question?
> The "Who is stronger than whom" question is an idiom that doesn't
> necessarily transfer into Klingon anyway. If you really need the most
> literal translation, try {'Iv HoS law' latlh HoS puS} instead. I
> think the simplest and most direct way to say it is probably {nIv
> 'Iv HoS?}
Evidently 'Iv HoS law' hasn't got a verb/adjective. nIv 'Iv HoS? makes
sense though.
> However, this is not particularly relevant to the passage that was
> presented for comment, which doesn't call for using a question at all.
> I will give my comments to it in a separate message.
Seems very dismissive.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/