tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 12 11:41:11 1996
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Re: nabwIj - tlhIngan wo' batlh (&KLBC)
>Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 13:44:53 -0800
>From: [email protected]
>Alan A. writes:
>>>wa'DIch, *pIcarD* wIHoHnIS
>>This "adverbial" use of {wa'DIch} isn't mentioned in TKD, and I don't know
>>of any canon examples of it. I don't like it.
> Why not? It clearly translates to "First, we must kill Picard". I'm not
>quite sure you think that this doesn't work. Isn't the point of adding
>{-DIch} to numbers to list first, second, etc...?
There are two kinds of "first"s. There's the kind that acts like an
adjectivem describing something (the first book), and there's the kind that
functions like an adverb, modifying the sentence as a while (first, we'll
go downstairs / he came first. In neither case is "first" modifying a noun
as an adjective would). We know that -DIch behaves as an adjective; it's
not clear that it works as an adverb. See page 54, where it says that they
"follow the noun" (as opposed to numbers formed with -logh, which are
explicitly stated to behave adverbially).
>>>bIlegh, *pIcarD* HoH toQDujwIj
>>"You see,..." is one of those annoying extraneous phrases one finds
>>scattered throughout English. It is certainly not something that a
>>true Klingon would say, and most Klingons would see it as a sign of
>>dithering and lack of straightforwardness.
>I thank you for your correction on my Klingon culture. However, I am
>focusing more on grammatical sense of this...pretend a human is saying this.
> ( a human who REALLy likes the Klingons :) Point well taken though
It's more than a cultural thing, though. It's a matter of idiom. "You
see," is a uniquely English thing to say. If I were to say in
conversational Hebrew "atah ro'eh... (at ro'ah...)" in that sense, my
interlocutor would look around mystified... what am I supposed to be
seeing? (that right, Doq?) It's a fossilized expression that we say in
English for no apparent reason, to fill spaces in our speech and maybe to
add a certain connotation to what we're saying. Klingons may do something
similar, but if they do there's no reason to think they say "you see."
"Yes, I see. The petaQ who took out my one eye didn't live long enough to
get at the other one. What's your point?" said Chang.
>>"Qu'vatlh! nuqDaq jangrajghach jay' "
>nuqjatlh? Where's the verb, and what do you mean by {jangrajghach}?
>If {-ghach} makes {jang} a noun? Why couldn't this mean "Where ARE my @#$&
>replies?"
Mostly because you're adding "-raj" to "jang", which is a VERB still. Yes,
"-ghach" would make it a noun, but you added -raj to the bare verb.
"jangghachraj" would work, but is deprecated, as Okrand has told us that
-ghach is not added to verbs with no verb-suffixes, and to do so results in
a highly marked word.
~mark