tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 18 08:29:21 1997

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Re: tlhab ja'qu'ghach



>Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 19:31:01 -0800 (PST)
>From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
>
>> there's a bit I'd like to address.  In the 18th line (of the Klingon text), 
>I
>> use "paghHommo'."  Completely uncanonical, but the way it works it this:  
>The
>> word for "all" with the diminuitive suffix means "most," so I decided to use
>> "paghHom" as "almost nothing."  So I translated "for light and transient 
>causes"
>> into "because of almost nothing."  Much clearer, isn't it?
>
>If you need to explain it, then there's another problem.  But I don't think I 
>can accept your analysis of {paghHom}.  And as for my own, "minor nothing" is 
>pretty nonsensical.

Makes no sense to me, either, fwiw.  (as a side point, you can say in Welsh
"fawr neb", literally "big nobody", to mean "a few people."  So here we
have a *larger* form of "nothing" and not a smaller one for a similar
meaning.  Goes to show you that you can't count on hindsight like this).
This sounds like a pretty classic hindsight word to me (except that even
after it's explained it still isn't so hot).

~mark


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