tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Dec 20 08:11:11 1995

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Re: Discussion topics

jatlhta' peHruS:
>Perhaps the most misunderstood posting of mine all week was:
>
>paqvo' wa' nav vIteq = I take a page from the book
>paqmo' qun vIghoj = I learn history from the book
>
>I would like more comments, yet, please.

I don't think your idea is all THAT bad. If you say that because of the 
book, you learned history, there may be ways to misinterpret it, but most 
people should understand what you mean. Causal relationships tend to be 
rather weak in terms of clarity, often, though you could say the same thing 
a couple other ways:

paqvam vIlaDDI' qun vIghoj.
paqvam vIlaDchugh qun vIghoj.
paqvam vIlaDmo' qun vIghoj.

That third example solves the problem of misinterpreting the nature of the 
causal relationship between the book and history. It is not the book which 
causes your learning history. It is the action of your reading the book 
which causes you to learn history. I personally find {-mo} to be far more 
frequently useful as a verb suffix than as a noun suffix. Actions cause 
actions more often than things cause actions, though things do sometimes 
cause actions.

>In TKD we find {SuSmo' joq} =
>flutters due to the wind.  ghunchu'wI' wondered if the book hit me, then I
>comprehended history.  Perhaps, my brilliant idea of using the suffix 
{-mo'}
>for "from" won't work after all.

I have a near reflexive response to any kind of "This Klingon word/affix = 
this English word" generalizations, especially where prepositions are 
concerned. I genuinely recommend forgetting the words as existing units and 
instead go back to the meaning of the whole sentence and try to build the 
Klingon sentence from the meaning of the sentence instead of the meaning of 
the individual words. I don't even think it is always a good idea to try to 
hold the same sentence boundaries.

The point is to say in Klingon that which is said in English. The original 
units are not significant. In particular, prepositions generalize poorly. 
There will be sentences where {-mo'} is translated as "from", but any 
attempt to generalize about that will probably produce as much frustration 
as it eliminates. Each such rule will have so many exceptions to be not 
altogether useful.

I respect what you are trying to do, but I don't think it will work.

>peHruS

charghwI'

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