tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 22 06:23:17 1993
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Re: themscrewyrelativeclauses
- From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: themscrewyrelativeclauses
- Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 09:22:43 EST
PLEASE DISREGARD MY FOOLISH PRIOR POST. ONCE AGAIN, I HAVE WRITTEN
BEFORE ENGAGING MY FEEBLE MIND. We have verbal suffixes for "when" and
"while", but not "where". The adverbial form of "where" is definitely a weak
point of the language and could use some attention.
On Nov 19, 8:05pm, [email protected] wrote:
> Subject: themscrewyrelativeclauses
>
> ~Shoulson came up with a idea for translating those dreadful relative
> clauses with the head noun functioning as a syntactic marker in the
> relative clause. Bla! Gives me cold shivers just thinking about it.
> His example was "I see the ship from which I fled," which came out
> *{'oHDaq vIHaw'pu'bogh Duj vIlegh}. I tell you what this looks like to
> me: "To it I fled, I see the ship." Your major problem here is that
> the antecedent for {'oH} is {Duj}, and {Duj} follows the pronoun. What
> could be screwier than that?
It may be odd, but I don't agree with your translation. It appears to
ignore -bogh. Where is the "which" in your translation? I see it more as "To
WHICH I fled, I see the ship," which is a normally backwards sentence in
Klingon. I tend to translate Klingon sentences in reverse word order because
it often makes more sense that way, disambiguating a lot of grammatical
knots. This makes me wonder: Would a Klingon poem rhyme the FIRST syllables
of each line?
The original sentence makes sense to me as intended. I often side with
the Guido of all Guidos, but this time it seems like much ado about very
little.
-- chargwI'