tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 12 13:17:55 2014
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Seeking a paragraph's translation
In line below.
> On Nov 12, 2014, at 3:23 PM, DataPacRat <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Thank you /very/ much for what you claim is merely an "attempt at
> translation" - it's certainly much better than I could have managed on
> my own, especially in the time since my post.
>
>
> Some languages focus entirely on the sounds of names; some attempt to
> also incorporate some aspect of the meaning, such as Japanese Kanji.
> It seems safe enough to focus on the sounds when dealing with Klingon.
The English alphabet is inconsistently phonetic, and a written English sentence represents a specific spoken sentence. The words, written left to right, are spoken in the same sequence beginning to end. Japanese Hiragana and Katagana are directly phonetic. Again, left to right (or sometimes top down) written characters represent the same sequence of sounds spoken beginning to end.
The Chinese characters that Kanji is based upon do not represent sounds at all. Each symbol has a meaning. People who speak different languages may share the same written symbols to communicate. They must translate the symbol into their spoken language before they can speak what they’ve read.
The interesting point here is that Kanji is used in Japanese to represent nouns only. All other parts of speech are written in Hiragana or Katagana. Which brings us back to names… The sound of a name of a person or place is like the adoption of a Kanji symbol to represent a thing. So, you can think of a Kanji character as a written representation of a thing’s name. It becomes a thing alien to the language of the speaker. The Kanji character would be the same for people using different languages.
If you tell your friends that you are going to visit some principle people, or tsa-la-gee, they probably wouldn’t realize that you mean “Cherokee”. So, names don’t translate well. It’s a messy area.
> The nominal goal of these translations is, as you suspected, the
> perspective of the future viewer of a cryonically-preserved body; with
> the speaker being the body's pre-mortem self, in the (distant?) past.
> English lets me get away with being vague on the tenses, but one
> solution might be for the final two sentences, the request for
> revival, to be treated differently from the preceding ones.
>
>
> I've read a few things by Douglas Hofstadter, so I'm well aware that
> 'exact match' and 'translation' aren't concepts that play well
> together.
>
>
>> DIS wa'SanID SochmaH jav
>
> If my page-flipping is right, this works out to 'year 1076'; did you
> mean for that to be '1976', just leaving out Hutvatlh, or are you
> using a Klingon calendar? If the latter, do you have a reference for
> it handy?
You are correct. When I wrestle with English spell checkers in Mail, sometimes words disappear. Thus Hutvatlh disappeared.
>> jIlaDqu' 'ej jIyIt 'e' vItIv.
>> jIyInqa' 'ej jIlaDqa' 'ej jIyItqa' vIneH.
>
> Comparing these two sentences, should 'e' be added to the latter, just
> before vIneH?
{neH} is a unique verb that never uses {‘e’} in a Sentence As Object construction. Just omit the {‘e’}. All of the following are correct:
jIjatlh ‘e’ vInID.
jIjatlh ‘e’ vISov.
jIjatlh vIneH.
The only reason the last one is different is that the verb is {neH}. This is explained in TKD in the section on Sentence As Object. It’s one of those exceptions Okrand gave us.
> ... And that's the extent of my ability to come up with a cogent
> reply. I look forward to any other posts to this thread.
> ...
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