tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Mar 31 13:32:57 1996

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: KLBC: jIqeqnISmo'...!



David Wood writes:
>So lessee... the banking profession could be {Huch malja'} -- "the business of 
>money." {qach} pops up as "building" or "structure," so a bank, a building where
>people handle money, could be {Huch malja' qach}. No?
>
>Assuming it is correct, the first sentence would be:
>
>munuQpu' Huch malja'
>
>because I'm not annoyed by the building, just the people carrying out business 
>inside.

majQa'!  bImeqchu'.

>Taking all three points into consideration, the sentence becomes:
>
>[checking account]wIj vIcherpu'DI' HuchwIj lulanHa'pu'.
>
>Note that the {pu'}s are still there. The way you interpreted the sentence 
>before was correct; they DID misplace the money as soon as I opened the account.

Now I *am* convinced you are misusing {-pu'}.  "When I had established
my checking account, they had misplaced my money."  This implies to me
that the money was already misplaced by the time the account was set up.
Your "DID" sure looks like past tense, not perfective.  That last word
definitely shouldn't have a perfective suffix.  Without it, it translates
as "When I had established my checking account, they misplaced my money."
This is pretty close, but now it implies that the money was misplaced
sometime *after* the account was set up.  Removing the other {-pu'} gives
"As soon as I established my checking account, they misplaced my money."
I really think this has the correct meaning.

>[account] pImDaq vaghvatlh [dollar]meywIj lanpu' Huch malja'!
>
>.if that told the whole story. But the money was the _opening_ balance, so I 
>really should have said:
>
>[account] pImDaq vaghvatlh [dollar]mey wa'DIchwIj lanpu' Huch malja'!
>
>See, that money was my opening balance. So they DID lose the money as soon as I 
>opened the account.

maj.  But are you describing the events that occurred, or are you talking
about the condition right now?  Using {-pu'} focuses on the completion of
the placement of the money.  If you just mean "They put it in a different
account" then you're just talking in the past tense, and you shouldn't use
the perfective suffix.

>=>QaQqu' vaj pIm [account]vetlh'e' vIghaj...
>
>=nuqjatlh?
>
>Directly translated from the pidgin, it should have read "It is good that I own 
>that different account." Indirectly, it's intended to say "Good thing that 
>different account is also mine." It looks like I got the word order all tangled 
>again...

Red alert!  "It is good that..." isn't a legal construction in Klingon.
The pronoun "it" stands for a complete sentence, and we don't have a way
to use a sentence as the subject of another sentence.  There are several
common ways to rephrase the idea to avoid this problem, but in this case,
a perfect solution presents itself: use the adverb {Do'} "luckily".
{Do' [account]vetlh pIm je vIghaj.}

-- ghunchu'wI'               batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj




Back to archive top level