tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 05 13:16:58 1997
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Re: "nuqneH" Sajatlh
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>Date: Sat, 1 Mar 1997 16:29:10 -0800
>From: [email protected] (Christian Weisgerber)
>
>jatlh Marian Schwartz <[email protected]>:
>
>> vagh) To Captain Krankor: I'd like to produce some backing from a real
>> language for your '"-vo'" trick'. I study German, although right now it's
>> pretty elementary. In German, "some of them" is "ein paar von ihnen," which
>> literally means "some from them." "von" means "from", [...]
>
>No, it doesn't.
>
>Since prepositions are used in highly idomatic ways (at least in IE
>languages), translating them on their own and not as part of a
>particular idiom is questionable. That said...
Prepositions are notoriously difficult to translate; they inhabit a fairly
vague semantic space, I think, and no two languages seem to map to them the
same way. Besides, the main question is not so much whether "-vo'" is the
right postposition (it could be argued that maybe we should use -Daq: "in
the six Klingons, I mean two of them."), but rather whether postpositions
in Klingon can be used to modify individual noun phrases at all. My
instincts say no.
~mark
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