tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 18 05:24:02 1997
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Re: The paradoxes of English...
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>Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 20:43:48 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "Thomas K. O'Brien" <[email protected]>
>
>Don't forget my favorite ... no cotages in cottage cheese (cottage choose?)
See http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~shoulson/EnglishTough.html for a really
excellent poem exploring these things. But they are a bit off-topic.
>Also, I am fluent in Italian and have found that there is just no possible
>way to express some things in Itallian that we take for granted as
>colloquilisms in English and vice versa. I see no reason to expect that our
>sayings should even begin to be transltable into the warriors languge or
>theirs into ours. Asking you to open a light is strange in English, but
>proper in Itallian. It is a good day to die in English, but only a Klingon
>(or Okrand?) could tell us what it truely is in thlIngan Hol.
Indeed. It's a little unsettling, when you think about how literal we have
to be in Klingon since we don't know its idioms, and how idiomatic most
other languages are. I remember we were talking about how one would ask
"How are you?" in Klingon... I was saying I liked "bIpIv'a'?", I've also
seen "DotlhlIj nuq?" and thought that was not bad either (I don't like
"chay' SoH")... but then again, in Hebrew none of these are normal; you'd
ask "mah sh'lomcha?/sh'lomech?" which means something like "what is your
peace?" ("peace" being an idiom for general status and well-being).
Unfortunately, we don't have much to go on in Klingon. I think I'd rather
be unnaturally literal than make up possibly really incomprehensible
idioms, absent better ideas.
~mark
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