tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 28 13:23:53 1997
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Re: KLBC:Book 1
>Date: Sun, 27 Jul 1997 17:18:36 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
>
>[email protected] on behalf of Kenneth Traft wrote:
>
>> The exercise was to translate the sentence into Klingon (The bus is coming.)
>
>> They have learned the prefix <mu-> at this point, but the sentence to
>> translate does not have the object "me" in it.
>
>This seems to me to be lacking in the number one major thing that all serious
>Klingonists need to learn: how to recast sentences into a more appropriate
>Klingon phrasing. {ghoS lupwI'} simply does NOT mean "The bus is coming." It
>means, "The bus is traveling on course." If you specify the course, {mughoS
>lupwI'}, then it's right. If you don't want to change the Klingon, then
>change the English.
>
>{ghoS lupwI'} is being used because it mimicks the English sentence. Your
>reasoning is that it's simplified for beginners. I think that you're
>oversimplifying {ghoS}, and teaching the wrong meaning of that verb.
I think this is unreasonably harsh on the lesson. Yeah, {ghoS lupwI'} is
probably not the ideally best translation for "the bus is coming" in
Klingon, under all circumstances. But (a) it does work sometimes, and I
could easily see someone yelling that to me as the bus approaches to get me
to hurry up to get to the station, and more importantly (b) It's a
*beginner's lesson*! Yes, it mimics English a bit much. Um, so? Yes,
beginners need to learn that you can't mimic English and expect it to
work. Doesn't mean you can't ease them into it. I've studied a lot of
books that start from basic basics, and you'd better believe they use
extremely simple and English-like sentences in the first chapter or two,
and simplify or restrict word-meanings in ways just like this.
~mark