tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 19 22:19:27 1995
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Re: KLBC
According to [email protected]:
>
> I have a friend on America Online who is a romance novelist...
> The typical "I love you"
> sequence we as humans have come to expect.
This is a request that comes up every few months or so. Others
have explained why your attempt didn't work, but didn't do much
to explain what might. First of all [charghwI' gets up on his
soapbox], you can't just rely on the words for the translation.
You have to think about the MEANING. While it is not really
true that Eskimos have 13 different words for snow, IF THEY DID
AND YOU WANTED TO SAY, "SNOW" IN ESKIMO, HOW WOULD YOU SAY IT?
Well, I, for one, do not believe that Klingon has no verb for
"love". They have a LOT of verbs for love. It is just that
English is so vague, that just like there is only one word for
what fictitious Eskimos would name by 13 different words,
depending on what kind of snow you might be talking about,
there is this one vague word in English for a lot of different
meanings. Klingons prefer to be inaccurate than to be
approximate. {chaq qarHa' tlhInganna' 'ach not pupHa'!}
qamuSHa'.
qaparHa'qu'.
SoHvaD reH jImatlhtaH.
reH qaSaHqu'.
reH qaQorgh 'e' vIlay'.
jIHvaD SoH potlh law' Hoch potlh puS.
quvlIj vIHubqangneS.
bangwI' SoHmo' jIHemqu'.
SoHvaD batlh jIHeghqang.
SoH neH qaneH.
chongongmoH.
manga'chuqDI' jIQom.
DuneHbogh HochvaD jIQobqu'.
bangwI' Damojchugh choquvqu'moHneS.
DuyonmoHbogh Hoch vInob.
yuchHom DaneH'a', be'Hom?
DoSlIj jIHmeH Dochmey tIn DabaHqangchugh vaj SoHvaD reH
jIyuntaH.
Get my point? "I love you," is such a lazy thing to say. If you
really mean it, then you should take the effort to say exactly
what you mean in greater detail. If you are simply being
manipulative, then your task should be more difficult.
And whoever thinks Klingon lacks a way to say, "I love you"
probably doesn't think enough about what it means.
bangna' jIH.
charghwI'
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