tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Dec 24 10:42:18 1996
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Re: KLBC: best & worst, WAS mu'thlheghmeywIj chorghDIch vImugh
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>Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 09:39:39 -0800
>From: "eric d. zay" <[email protected]>
>
>
>> > or is there a much simpler way of stating the ideas of "better" and
>"worse"?
>
>Actually, in The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand has furnished us with a simple
>way of saying "best" or "worst". I did not notice it untill I read
>Captain. Krankors "From the Grammarians Desk" in HolQeD Vol. 5 #2. Krankor
>points out the proverb on page 121 of TKW: *bortaS nIvqu' 'oH bortaS 'e' *,
>"Revenge is the best revenge." Here, *nIvqu' * meaning "very superior" is
>used in place of "the best". Thus It seems to me that *QIvqu' * would work
>for "worst" also.
A good point, and they'd probably work okay in most situations, but I'd
caution you against getting too caught up in translating words. "nIvqu'"
means "very superior" and "QIvqu'" means "very inferior." That's what they
MEAN. It happens that those concepts sometimes under some circumstances
wind up translating well as "best" and "worst," but they are NOT
translations of those words. Don't go around thinking you can plug in
stock Klingon words or phrases for English ones; it ain't the way languages
work (remember charghwI''s metaphor of the puzzle: you can't translate an
English jigsaw puzzle into a Klingon one by taking each English piece
[word] and rooting around for a Klingon one the same shape. You have to
erase the lines, and go back to the original picture, and re-carve the
puzzle into Klingon pieces). Okrand uses "nIvqu'" as "best" because that
works well in the English translation, even as he uses "cold warriors" to
translate "Suvrupbogh SuvwI'pu'". That doesn't change its meaning, it just
uses an appropriate English phrasing.
~mark
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