tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu May 11 14:38:21 1995

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Re: Suggestions for animation on the trefoil screen saver?

According to Matt Gomes:
> 
... 
> toH!  Dochvetlh 'IH!
 
If you wanted that to be a sentence, it should have been {'IH
Dochvetlh!} When such a verb follows a noun, it acts like an
adjective in what then is usually a larger sentence, like
{Dochvetlh 'IH vIchup.} "I recommend this beautiful thing." If,
instead, you want to say, "This thing is beautiful," you need
{'IH Dochvetlh!}

> nuq bIchup mu'tlhegh?  (Is this right?)

This is DEFINITELY confused. Don't be discouraged. Just look at
this and learn. First, {nuq} acts like a noun when you work
with word order, so here it would be an object. Meanwhile, you
used {bI-}, which is the prefix you want when you have NO
object. You wanted {Da-} instead. The next word means
"sentence" and I don't know what it is doing there. It is in
the subject position, but the verb prefix establishes that the
subject is second person singular. Unless the person you are
speaking to is named {mu'tlhegh}, this is a mistake.

If you want to ask, "What sentence do you recommend?" we hit an
awkward void in the question words given by Okrand. Notice that
here, in English, "what" is acting like an adjective, not a
noun, and it would REALLY be better stated as "which". Okrand
doesn't give us a word for "which".

In my usual fashion, when I see something that doesn't seem to
work right, instead of trying to figure out how to make it work
right, I drop it and look for a way to recast with some other
grammatical tool which DOES seem to work right.

mu'tlhegh Dachupbogh HIja'. "Tell me the sentence that you
recommend." Notice that in common English, the word "that" is
replaced by "which", though picky stylists prefer to use
"which" in this setting only if the relative clause is
parenthetical rather than exclusive. By this, I mean the
difference between, "Tell me the sentence that you prefer," vs.
Tell me the sentence, which reminds me of a joke I heard
yesterday." In the first example, the relative clause helps
exclude all other sentences from the one you prefer (hence, it
is exclusive - it points out one sentence to the exclusion of
all others). In the second example, the relative clause adds
information about the sentence which is unnecessary for
determining which sentence we are talking about.

So, in English, it is a question, while in Klingon it is a
command, but it still has the same meaning. That is the point
of recasting, after all.

> Qapla'
> 
> -majIq

charghwI'
-- 

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  ">   | Get a grip.
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