tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 27 23:45:24 1994
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Re: Translation help!
- From: Mark Reed <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Translation help!
- Date: Fri, 28 Jan 1994 12:43:59 -0500 (EST)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> from "Matt Gomes" at Jan 28, 94 08:37:12 am
\ja' marqoS:
\
\>quv means "be honored"; as an adjectival verb...
\
\Pardon my lack of knowledge of my own language (and it's probably
\really obvious), but... how do you know it's an adjectival verb (and what
\in the heck *is* and adjectival verb)?
Okay. Klingon does not have adjectives. It has nouns, verbs,
and chuvmey. To communicate concepts for which English uses an adjective,
Klingon uses a verb. This is related to the lack of a verb "to be" in
Klingon. For instance, English has the adjectives "red", "soft", and
"hot". One may describe an ojbect using forms of the verb "to be" (is, are,
am, was, were, etc.) with these adjectives, e.g.
That star is red.
This bed is soft.
I'm hot.
Klingon, in contrast, has the verbs Doq (be red), tun (be soft), and
tuj (be hot); the above sentences would be translated as
Doq Hovvetlh
tun QongDaqvam
jItuj
Pretty straightforward. Klingon has a separate verb for each adjective,
instead of a whole separate part of speech dedicated to them. But this
scheme only works in sentences like the above, where the adjective is in
the predicate, after the verb. How do you say, for instance, "We're orbiting
the red star"? You could use -bogh:
Doqbogh Hov wIbav We're orbiting the star which is red.
But there's no need to be that wordy. The verbs that function in adjectival
roles may be used as if they were, in fact, adjectives; just place the verb
after the noun it modifies:
Hov Doq wIbav We're orbiting the red star.
Your first question, "How do we know it's an adjectival verb?", is a subject
of debate. The question is important because of the implications for this
second rule; when may you use "<Noun> <Verb>" and when do you have to use
"<Verb>bogh <Noun>"? The conservative school holds that only those verbs
whose English translation is "be <Adjective>" may be used to directly modify
a noun in this way. The less conservative extrapolationists argue that this
distcinction is not clearly made, and that "<Noun> <Verb>" should be legal in
place of <Verb>bogh <Noun>" for any verb. I personally have adopted the
conservative approach.
\
\Qapla'!
'ej Qapla' Daghajjaj SoH
-marqoS