tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 08 04:32:36 1994

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Re: Quenya phrase

According to KLI Rount Table Account:
> 
> 
> > According to Niall Hosking:
> > > 
> > > Can anyone help me with the following phrase (in Tolkien's Quenya)?
> > > 
> > > 'The stars shine on the hour of our greeting.'
> > > 
> 
> While I generally leave translating to those who have more facility with 
> the language (like ~mark and krankor and charghwI' and Holtej and, well, 
> you get the idea) I just got back from delivering a paper at the 25th 
> meeting of the Mythopoeic Society and hanging out with a bunch of Elvish 
> scholars. In the course of my talk I translated Frodo's greeting as:
> 
>      qIHtaHghachmaj rep bochbejjaj Hov
> 
> If this is wrong, do let me know...

[charghwI' rubs his hands together and salivates at the
invitation...]

More seriously, this is an interesting translation. I
completely agree that {qIH} is a good choice. I didn't know
that the meeting was their first meeting. I always feel a
little shakey about nomilizations and personally tend to avoid
them just because IT'S ONE OF THOSE THINGS OKRAND NEEDS TO
CLARIFY and until he does, I just stay away from it, but I
won't give anybody else too hard a time for being bolder than I.

Now, as to the verb {boch}, it really doesn't sound very
transitive in TKD. I know that transitivity is yet another
thing Okrand is very vague about, but to me "shine, be shiny"
feels a lot like it just works with a subject and no object. I
could see stretching things to say {bochmoHbejjaj}, as in "The
stars cause the hour of our initial meeting to be shiny." I
think that has to do, since we don't have a verb for
"illuminate", which is what we mean by "shine on". A better
choice might be {wovmoHbejjaj}, since it has fewer implications
about color and texture.

So, in my cowardly aversion of nominalization, my own variation
on your intriguingly literal translation would be:...

Ummm. I didn't expect it to come out like this, but:

maqIHtaHvIS rep wovmoHbejjaj Hovmey.

I was going to use a relative clause, but I realized that the
hour is a "when" and not a "which". This was one of those
problems that seemed at first to be an impenetrable wall just
before it turned into tissue and blew away in shreds. "While we
meet for the first time, may the stars make the hour definitely
bright."

nuq DaQub?

>, but let me point out a few things. The 
> context of this line in my talk was to show that while some things may be 
> lost in translation, other things can be gained. For example, Quenya 
> (unlike English or Klingon) distinguishs between incluusive and exclusive 
> uses of "we" (an early typo in LOTR had Frodo excluding the elves from 
> the welcome, applying it the star's shining to only im and his party). 

Interesting.

> This is lost, both in English and Klingon, unless you want to really go 
> out of your way.  On the other hand, I deliberately used a nominalized 
> form of qIH, rather than ghom, because it was their first meeting, a 
> subtlty thatexists in Klingon, but NOT in Quenya.

I've always enjoyed the difference between these verbs.

> Comments are most welcome.
> 
> Oh, and by the way, the conference was quite fun, and we may see some 
> more cross over from the Elvish community in the near future. :)
> 
> Lawrence
> 

[charghwI' is stricken by the image of small, well-armed
individuals with pointy ears, fuzzy toes and ridged
foreheads... and shudders.]

charghwI'

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