tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 24 07:25:23 1996

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Re: KLBC: Most likely an easy question to answer...

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>Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 12:52:50 -0700
>From: "David W. Schaefer" <[email protected]>

With the KLBC header, this is technically the Beginners' Grammarian's bag,
but you specifically asked me, and the BG is still wading through backlog,
and besides, as Grammarian I'm allowed to step on his toes.

>batlhtaHDI', mughojmoHtaH batlhtaH

>Okay, I'm one up on you, because I know this is wrong.  And this has been
>buggin' me all day.  This is the phrase I'm trying to translate:
>"He who honors teaches me to honor."

>Hmm.  Word order's wrong for one thing, isn't it.  

>batlhtaHDI' = when he honors
>mughojmoHtaH = he teaches me
>batlhtaH = honoring (?)

>I flim-flammed between -DI' and -viS, though neither seemed quite right.  -DI'
>is more of a "as soon as" according to TKD and that's not the right aspect.
>-vIS, of course, is "while" which seemed a little closer perhaps, but still not
>it.  

Hmmm.  Interesting; the English is tricky enough for me, actually. I think
part of what's killing you is that you're not doing the "he who" part at
all.  What you have is "when he honors, he teaches me, he is honoring."
Let's start with the harder piece, and I'll give you a hint for the easier
one.

Consider "he teaches me to honor."  Klingon often handles this with a
sentence-as-object construction.  What does this really mean?  You're right
about the word-order; if "batlhtaH" really were the right way to say "to
honor" or "honoring" as a noun (it isn't), it would have to *precede* the
verb "teaches", since it's the object, isn't it?  "Teaches me to honor" is
a slightly complicated example, since we have two objects: "me" and "to
honor."  There's another way, but for simplicity we'll take "me" as the
indirect object: he teaches honoring TO me.  So we have "jIHvaD" at the
beginning, "to me,..." (since -vaD nouns come at the head of the sentence,
as do all nouns that are neither subject nor object).  What's the object of
the sentence?  "Honor."  We can cop out and use "batlh" the NOUN (it's both
a noun and an adverb; your *batlhtaHDI' is wrong because there's no verb
"batlh"; look up the verb "quv") as the object, and that's pretty simple.
Or we can actually use a sentence as object: he teaches me that I honor
(not exactly the same meaning as the usual English for this sentence).
What does he teach me?  The *whole sentence* "I honor."  That requires the
use of a verb and the pronoun 'e' and jiggling the word-order again, since
jIHvaD now doesn't come at the beginning... Maybe we should forget about
this path for now, until you have the noun version down.

Anyway.  Once you have that, you need "he who honors."  Remember that you
need a VERB and look up the verb-suffix "-wI'".  That's likely what you
want.

Hope my clues weren't too much like spoilers.

~mark

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