tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 04 14:46:03 1997
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Re: More on "jIjatlh" et al.
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: More on "jIjatlh" et al.
- Date: Fri, 4 Jul 1997 17:48:27 -0400 ()
- Priority: NORMAL
On Thu, 3 Jul 1997 17:10:14 -0700 (PDT) "Dr. Lawrence M.
Schoen" <[email protected]> wrote:
> I finally managed to pull myself over to the mailing list and read some
> of the interesting posts that have been piling up.
>
> My congratulations to Will Martin on his recent vindication regarding
> direct quotations and the like.
jImontaH.
...
> For example, could I say:
>
> ngevwI' Hegh jIleghbe'
>
> to indicate that I have not yet seen the play "Death of a Salesman"?
jImon 'e' vImev.
Realize that everything about that English example reeks of
idiom. We "see" a play. Klingons may attend one, or hear one, or
remain at one or participate in one or join one or... And while
we have titles for things like "Two brothers fight each other",
we don't really have any examples of them being used in complete
sentences. We can't be sure that a title is used with the same
grammar as a direct quotation. I'd be rather surprised if it
were. Just because English uses quotation marks for both doesn't
mean that Klingons consider them to be similar concepts.
> Or what about:
>
> cha' vengmey lut jIlaD
>
> to say that I have read "A Tale of Two Cities"?
My skin is crawling.
> Both of these seem plausible to me, but also disturbing.
I definitely half agree with you.
> If you follow
> this kind of thinking you can argue that you can use almost any verb
> this way. After all if you can "read" the thing, you can also "dislike"
> it or "finish" it or "misunderstand" it and so on.
But there is no reason to associate it with direct quotations.
We don't put direct quotations around brand names, while in
essence these really are titles similar to plays and books. My
Sony TV is not a "Sony" TV, so why is my Tale of Two Cities book
a "Tale of Two Cities" book? It is arbitrary, and I doubt it
would carry from one language to the other. It could, on whim
from Okrand, but I would not count on it.
> Let's go back to the first example. If I say:
>
> tlhIngan Hol jIjatlh I said "Klingon language"
>
> How then do you use 'e'? If the reply to the above is:
>
> 'e' vIyajbe' I didn't understand it
Well, for starters, you might just say, {nuqjatlh?} or
{qayajta'be'}. What exactly is the "it" you didn't understand?
If it is just the spoken words "Klingon language", {'e'} is not
a valid grammatical choice here, since it can only represent
preceeding sentences and {tlhIngan Hol} is not a sentence.
> then what does the "it" refer to? Is the 'e' the direct quote, or the
> entire previous statement? If the latter, could you express the former
> by using a different prefix?
>
> I don't know. And I'm hoping I've missed something in my skimming of
> the list and that wiser heads (aka, grammarians) will set me back on the
> true path.
I hope this helps.
> Meanwhile, it's less than two weeks to the qep'a' loSDIch, and I'm sure
> we'll have a LOT to talk about there.
You betcha.
> Lawrence
>
> --
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charghwI'