tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Apr 25 10:31:11 1996
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Re: bang
>Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 07:11:10 -0700
>From: [email protected] (Bill Willmerdinger)
>We now have canon for using {bang} without the {-wI'}: page 159 of TKW gives
>{reH bang larghpu'}, with {bang} translated as "love" or "one who is loved".
It's {larghlu'} actually.
This isn't really significant on its own, since we've seen "bang" by itself
already (like, when it's defined). I think you're thinking that {bang} was
given as a verb and now we're seeing it as a noun. In fact, {bang} was
always defined as a noun, meaning "one who is loved."
I marked that page, though, because it DOES tell us something I thought was
meaningful. In the book, you can *hear* Okrand talking to us. He
definitely had us in mind when writing it. You can hear it in his
painstaking explanations whenever a grammar mistake is made (well, most of
the timea), or when the Englishg translations differs even *slightly* from
the literal Klingon. He knew we (and people like us) would be going over
every word with a fine-toothed comb, trying to tease out new words, new
constructions, and new shades of meaning.
Thus, note that ion this page, he is careful to tell us that the literal
translation speaks of "one who is loved" or "a beloved" and NOT the
abstract concept of "love" that the English version has. I think this is
very significant, as it indicates that he is deliberately closing the door
on the interpretation of "bang" as the abstract noun "love" (a position the
KLI has tended to favor, but which has not been in universal acceptance).
He could just as easily have left well enough alone and let us know that
the abstract noun translation was okay... but he didn't. I think that
tells us something.
~mark