tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 01 15:45:00 1994

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Re: 'ovpu'ghach, and some commentary.



batlh choja', Mark E. Shoulson quv:

=If you mean "with a sword", try "'etlh lo'taHvIS".  

I think you're dismissing Richard's coinage too readily. As I said, it is
*very* interesting...

=I've been doing some re-writing, re-editing my Jonah again, and I think my
=Klingon has made a big improvement.  

Gads, haven't we all. I was looking over some of my first Klingon thingys
and... oboy.

=I'm finally starting to move away from
=my overly literal style, and working more toward how a user of the language
=would cast the concepts

Could this be Mark talking? Mark "Literal Translation or your Money Back"
Shoulson? Oh, stop it, Mark; you're making me feel old! ;) (When did you
do that Lojban Genesis again? 1991?)

=Frankly, I feel my
=style is starting to get closer to charghwI''s, whom I consider a very good
=model in casting sentences Klingonically rather than Englishly.  

Making me feel very old indeed. I don't know, maybe I've been taking up
the mantle of literalism that Mark's discarding. I've got a lot -ghach's
in my work, probably too much, and the extra -taH- means they're no
longer that appealing... but it'll take more to convince me that they
have no place in Klingon prose. And in your new phrase, well, SIch pagh.
You know?

And I feel the attack against ghaj not well justified. Why assume it *does*
mean only 'possess'? Why can't people 'have' time? True, the Lojban 
equivalent, "ckaji lo banzu temci", is something of a translationism, but 
why shouldn't ghaj have the meaning of ckaji, "to be characterised by", 
*especially* as Klingon vocabulary tends to avoid the abstract anyway. Do you 
know of a better word for "ckaji"?

Breaking up those relative clauses was definitely a good idea, though.
Especially in conjunction with your appositions, they were making your
text hard to read, as did your type 5 suffixes invading relative clause
heads in all sorts of... well, ground-breaking ways. ;)

But like I say,

=I'm still looking for a verb for "to feel an emotion",
=since "pung ghaj" for "to have mercy" is really awful, 

It is? I'm much less sure.

(Ouch. I just had a brainstorm saying it *is* that bad, and something
more like taH (probably not SIQ) can be helpful. But I'm not committing
myself yet...)

=that aren't all that unpleasant.  Also, we can say something more
=meaningful: "to have mercy on someone" most of the time means "to act out
=of mercy toward someone", thus putting the emphasis on the actual *action*
=(incidentally a Klingonic perspective).  

Oh, fair enough for that one. But what of just plain "to be merciful"?
Won't pung ghaj still do for that?

Incidentally, in case you can't read between the lines, I'm being soundly
trounced here, and I'm trying to weasel my way out of it. ;)

-- 
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|               --- Roy Andrew Miller,  _The Japanese Language_,  p. 251   |
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