tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 23 15:46:15 1997
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Re: KLBC: The first time, Grammar check
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>Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 16:27:55 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
>
>jatlh peHruS:
>
>> loS Hu' wa'netlh loS *feet* juSbogh HuD vItoSta'bogh Qu' vIqIH
>
>"Four days ago I met (for the first time) a task of a mountain which I had
>climbed which overtook 10,004 feet."
>
>nuqjatlh?!?
>
>"Meeting a challenge" is an English metaphor; we don't know that Klingons
>"meet for the first time" their tasks. For all we know, they talk of
>"beginning to fight for a task." We have no way of knowing.
I didn't much like the use of {qIH}, but what bothered me more was trying
to parse those relative clauses. Let me see...
{loS Hu'} (maybe it should be written {loSHu'}?)... so far no problem.
{wa'netlh loS *feet* juSbogh HuD}, a mountain that "passes" 10,004 feet. A
little weird choice-of-words-wise, but I'm still with you so far as the
syntax goes.
{vItoSta'bogh} "which I climbed." I presume the object is the mountain,
the subject is "I" (of course)... But now how does this noun phrase relate
to the noun after it? Wait, in N-N? As in "the task of a 10,004-foot-tall
mountain which I climbed"? What's a mountain's task, whether or not you've
climbed it? Apposition? It's an awfully heavy noun phrase to use in
apposition, and since when is a mountain a task?
I'm really puzzled by your construction in this sentence. The words
trouble me less.
>HuD Dung bIng je jojDaq wa'netlh loS "feet" tu'lu'
>There are 40,004 feet from the top of the mountain to the bottom.
Just how tall IS this puppy?
>> HuD nach pawpa' ghomwI' poS qamwIj tlhe'lu'
>
>"Before the open (left side?) encounterer arrived the mountain's head, my foot
>was turned."
>
>nuqjatlh?!?
"poS qamwIj": the left-side's my-foot. Or my foot of the left side. It
sounds kind of stilted to me (using -wIj on the second noun of a N-N
construction seems weird, since you're already attributing ownership to
something else, and now you're putting -wIj to attribute ownership to
yourself?) I might have also gone with {poSwIj qam} (the foot of my left
side), but that also seems strange. It's the FOOT that we really want to
say is mine. I suppose both ways have their problems.
>> pov povmeH jan vIlIghpu' 'ej ropyaH vIpaw
>
>"In the afternoon I had ridden a device for being excellent and [now] I
>arrived the infirmary."
>
>What's a {povmeH jan}?
Heh. When I read this I read "In order to make the afternoon excellent" (I
actually read it ironically: "to top off the afternoon...") "I rode a
device." Which in retrospect doesn't make much sense; "jan" isn't the word
I'd have expected. {povmeH jan} I suppose could be believable for
"ambulance", but it's a pretty poetical-sounding image.
~mark
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