tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 23 08:44:07 1996
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Re: Hughwij vIpe'pa' vISov jIpoQu
According to Alan Anderson:
>
> David Wood writes:
> > How do I learn more about the "ship-in-which-I-fled" problem without
> >choking the mailing list with backchat?...
> Let's use {DujDaq megh Sop HoD} "The captain eats lunch in the ship" as an
> example. We can use either "captain" or "lunch" in a relative clause for
> the object of another sentence, for instance "I see [it]." We have tools
> to say either {DujDaq megh Sopbogh HoD'e' vIlegh} "I see the captain who
> eats lunch in the ship" or {DujDaq megh'e' Sopbogh HoD vIlegh} "I see the
> lunch which the captain eats in the ship." We don't have a way to say "I
> see the ship in which the captain eats lunch." We can't use {-'e'} to mark
> the locative, because both {-'e'} and {-Daq} are type 5 suffixes and cannot
> be used at the same time. We don't have any other tools to use. The only
> good way to get across the meaning is to break it into two sentences:
> {DujDaq megh Sop HoD. Dujvetlh vIlegh} "The captain eats lunch in the ship.
> I see that ship."
This is not actually a response to ghunchu'wI', since I know he
already knows what I'm about to say. It is just a comment to
add to his good response to the original question.
Well, there are often different ways to cast things. I'd cast
THAT sentence as:
DujvetlhDaq megh Sop HoD 'e' vIleghpu'.
"I have seen the captain eat lunch on that ship." It does not
have the grammatical structure of the original English, and
technically, in Klingon, it is two different sentences, but by
our romanized, punctuated conventions, we treat it as one
sentence, and it really carries all the same meaning of the
original. Ideally, we'd like to emphasize the ship, but again,
this runs into the problem of wanting to use two Type 5
suffixes on the same word.
Still, this is not a generally useful recasting. I can't use it
as a method for recasting other grammatically similar
sentences. I can get away with it here because of a few
convenient relationships of the actions. When I say, "on that
ship", one presumes that I now can see it, so that satisfies
the original meaning of "I see the ship on which...". Also,
stating that the captain eats lunch on the ship usually implies
that I have seen the captain eat lunch on that ship. If this is
not the case, then the original meaning branches off into one
of the many different possible meanings of the original
English, like:
DujvetlhDaq megh Sop HoD net Sov.
Basically, this means that "that ship" is the place where it is
generally known that the captain eats lunch (without implying
that I've actually seen this occurance). Again, the meaning is
conveyed without reflecting the grammatical structure of the
original English.
This is the core of what I press for when I encourage people to
recast. The Klingon translation is in no way obliged to reflect
the grammatical structure of the original English sentence. It
must convey the meaning, not the structure, and quite often a
completely different structure in Klingon will better convey a
specific meaning than that same meaning stated in English.
This is true on both sides of the task of translation. When
translating into English, you don't have to reflect the same
grammatical structure as the original Klingon.
"The ship on which I fled" is a fine example of an English
grammatical structure which does not work in Klingon at all. It
doesn't mean we can't convey this meaning. It just means that
we can't use this specific tool to express this specific
meaning. What tool we do choose will depend upon the specific
sentence we are translating, because of factors like the ones I
showed here.
> -- ghunchu'wI' batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj
charghwI'
--
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