tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 02 08:50:30 1996

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Re: KLBC: Cold nights

Eskil Heyn Olsen writes:
>rammey bIr nI' net noH
>'ach ramvaD wItay' SoH jIH je'
>qatlh nI'be'bej 'oH
>
>Does this make sense or do I have to bring out the english version ?

It makes enough sense for me to understand what you meant.  I translate:
"The long cold nights; one estimates that
 but you and I are together [it] for the benefit of the night
 why is it certainly not long?"

I see one big problem and a few little ones.  I'll take them in order:

The placement of {nI'} looks incorrect in the first line; I think what you
wanted to say is {nI' rammey bIr} "the cold nights are long."  When you use
the pronoun {net}, it's supposed to stand for a complete sentence.

The verb prefix on {tay'} should be {ma-}.  The sentence has no object, and
I don't think {tay'} *can* have an object.

You misspelled the noun conjunction {je}.  {je'}, with the extra apostrophe
at the end, means either "buy" or "feed".

The second and third lines have no grammatical connection.  You probably
mean something like {matay'taHvIS} or {matay'DI} "When we are together..."

Here's the big problem: "for the night" is an idiomatic expression that
doesn't translate using {-vaD}.  Because you *did* use {-vad}, it seems
that you wrote this in English (or some other language with this idiom)
first and then translated into Klingon, without considering the Klingon
grammar enough to avoid this sort of mistranslation.
What does "for the night" really mean?  A simplistic translation might be
"while the night occurs" {qaStaHvIS ram}.

>The "SoH jIH je'" in sentence two is used for emphasis on "you and I" and
>not just "we".

I understood that part perfectly.

This feels like poetry, so I'll let you make any changes to it you want.

-- ghunchu'wI'               batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj

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