tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 11 11:41:04 1996

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Re: perpetual Today Is A Good Day...

According to Anttila Riku-Pekka:
... 
> > All this "In order that we die, today is good," translations
> > also seem weird and overly attached to the wording of the
> > English.
> 
> Just one question. I promise this will be my first and last post 
> concerning the sentence.
> Would
> 	HeghmeH jaj QaQ 'oH DaHjaj'e'
> 
> be so awful? 

In a word, yes. Details to follow.

> jaj is modified with the adjectival verb and a -meH clause, 
> making it, to my understanding, very near to "good day (in order) to die".

What you have is grammatically correct, though it leans so
heavily on constructions which were added to Klingon as a
compromise. First, realize that Okrand originally intended for
Klingon to have no verb "to be". In the one face-to-face
meeting I had with him many years ago, he said exactly that. He
seemed excited to have at least one face in the crowd who
understood what a cool thing it would be to have a language
without the verb "to be" and how proud he was to have
accomplished that to the extent that he has. It makes the
language more interesting, highlighting how weird it is that
English depends on it so heavily.

This is also why it was so comical for the producers (read that
"persons who sign Okrand's paycheck") turned to him and said,
"Give me 'To be or not to be.'" Even he winces at {taH pagh
taHbe'}, but hey, the guy was on the spot.

He created adjectival verbs specifically to avoid the verb "to
be". Instead the verb "to be" would be implied as an aspect of
the meaning of the root verb. QaQ DaHjaj. Today is good. There
is no "to be" verb in the Klingon, but in the English, we have
"is", which is the verb "to be".

So, how could Okrand handle "I am a Klingon,"? He decided to
use the pronouns as verbs. tlhIngan jIH. Sort of like "Me
Tarzan." Again, he avoids a verb "to be", but not by much.

So now, you are stacking two forms of implied "to be" verbs,
weighing in heavily English in the reliance on "to be" and
leaving any Klingon character waaaaay in the dust, boldly going
where no honorable Klingon would dare tread. jaj QaQ 'oH
DaHjaj'e'.

wejpuH.

And then you preface that with {HeghmeH}. Literally, this means,
"In order that he dies" but it is true that {-meH} verbs
sometimes lack a prefix, thereby incidentally making them
APPEAR to have the null prefix. That's why I personally tend to
go WAAAAY out of my way to avoid simply dropping an implied
prefix on verbs with {-meH}.

You can grammatically justify each step of the process of
creating this sentence, but in the end, it just doesn't feel
remotely Klingon in nature. That's why I hate, "Today is a good
day to die." Everybody tries to translate it as close to
literally as possible and the result always makes me wince. It
is a newbie land mine and they line up to walk on it.

> Someone suggested this sentence some time back but was confronted with 
> the usual dislike towards translation attempts, and the sentence was
> left unquoted.
> 
> > DaHjaj batlh jIHeghrup!
> 
> I agree that this non-literal translation is better.

Thanks.

> > charghwI'
> 
>  .:ghor:.

charghwI'
-- 

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