tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 01 21:26:56 1994

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'ovpu'ghach, and some commentary.

>From: [email protected] (Nick NICHOLAS)
>Date: Wed, 2 Feb 94 20:28:20 EDT

>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...

Well, I don't know.  I looked at his coinage, and saw what he seemed to
want to say, and it just plain doesn't work that well for me.  Using "-mo'"
for an instrumental in this case doesn't quite make it for me (true, I said
"DIchmo' jIjatlhlaHbe'" for "I can't speak with certainty" (and
incidentally was ambiguous between "I can't (speak with certainty)" i.e. I
can't speak because I'm certain, or "I can't speak because I'm certain",
but English is at least that bad in lots of cases), but that seemed a
different usage and meaning to me).  I'd prefer the "-taHvIS" idiom or a
"-meH" clause, really.

>=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?)

*grin*.  Maybe it's just a phase I'm going through.

>=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?

Yeah, I lost the SIch in that Jonah phrase (don't do that next time,
deleting the phrase you meant, I mean.  You really lost me a sec).  But I
decided it was just plain more natural this way.  It's how a Klingon would
say it.  OK, I'm not being completely consistent even; I'm having trouble
with a sentence in chapter 2 about prayer going to you and losing the
"-ghach" on the word for prayer, but there the text is very explicit about
the prayer being the subject and going to the addressee.  I guess I'm not
so far gone to feel totally comfortable with "SoHvaD jIqoy'" yet.  But I
might.

I won't say that "-ghach" has no place in Klingon prose; but I will say
that one should be (or at least, I probably will be) much more careful in
using it, only using it when it really works and makes sense.  Nominalize
only when things don't work better in other ways (which is sort of
redundant: you should always try to do what works best), and don't go
sticking in suffixes just to use the nominalizer.

>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"?

I may be a little hard on "ghaj"; after all, Okrand himself gave us "pIch
vIghajbe'" for "it's not my fault", and you don't "possess" blame.  Still,
I am trying to take a sort of E-primish view of "ghaj" as well, cut through
the polysemy and say what it *means*, not just a convenient word that
covers lots of bases.  This it similar to the movement away from "Doch" for
everything, toward "wanI'" and "ghu'" and "vuD" and so forth in phrases
like "because of that" and such.  And as an added bonus, it also fits the
subjective notions of how Klingons would talk that I start getting in my
head from the tape's discussion.

>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. ;)

Hey, it was the best I had on hand...

>=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...)

OK, maybe not awful, but I still don't like it.  Turns out that two or
three of the times it was used in Jonah, "vup" works better, and the
remaining one or two I could also recast.

>=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?

In a pinch, but I'd still avoid it.  Maybe "pung 'ang" would be better, but
I still prefer "pungmo' Da/vang/ta'" with varying degrees of comfort, or
something. 

>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. ;)

Muahahaha.... :-)

~mark

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