tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 06 12:02:17 1997

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Question-Relative Clause

I can't keep quiet any longer...

for one thing, I would like to stress that there are two possibilities:

1) I have an expression in Klingon and am looking for its English equivalent
2) I have an expression in English and am looking for its Klingon equivalent

these are DIFFERENT

seems to me that sometimes they are mixed up in the arguments

now, let me respond to Scott Murphy:

> This being said, I wish to point out (as others have) that nowhere in TKD
> does it say that questions cannot serve as objects of 'e'.  In fact, in

this is true; but nowhere in TKD do I find an explanation on how to
interpret these constructs. If I interpret them similarly to 
Statements-as-objects, they don't make sense (if you don't believe this
read what e.g. charghwI' wrote about it recently!); If I interpret
them as relative clauses, then what is the difference between them 
and "real" Klingon relative clauses and why didn't the author use
a verb+{-bogh} structure? (I come back to this when we look from the
other direction)

> the section on relative clauses, TKD states "Relative clauses are
> translated into English as phrases beginning with who, which, where, and,
> most commonly, that.  Like adjectives, they describe nouns: the dog which
> is running, the cat that is sleeping, the child who is playing, the
> restaurant where we ate.  The noun modified by a relative clause is the

this section deals with KLINGON sentences containing verb+{-bogh}
and how to best translate them into English

> head noun."  The sentence "They don't know how this happened," does not

now, you're talking about how to translate an ENGLISH sentence 
INTO KLINGON! again: this is DIFFERENT from the above!

> contain a relative clause.  In fact, it doesn't even contain a noun which
> would serve as the head noun.  The subject is "they".  The object is "how
> this hapopened".  The verb is "don't know".  Until we either see an
> example in canon of a sentence like this, or get an explanation from
> Okrand.  The question IS still open for debate.
> 

OK, the general subject, we're dealing with here is: two verbs that are
somehow related to each other.

Klingon does this either with type 9 suffixes (-bogh, -DI', -pa', -meH,
-mo', -chugh) or with the sentence-as-object construction

English does this in its own ways, which I cannot list, because I'm
not a native speaker. However, I believe my native language, German,
is similar enough that my arguments translate well...

according to my grammar, structures that correspond to the ones here
discussed and referred to as "questions-as-object" fall into basically
two categories:

1) those that are equivalent to a relative clause
2) those that refer to one of several possibilities

obviously, in case 1) you should translate them using the one known
mechanism to express relative clauses, because the back-translation 
from Klingon to English is guaranteed to give at least an equivalent
sentence

as for case 2), all the examples I have seen in my grammar ar of the
type "sentence as subject", an even uglier beast (and you might argue
that even there, the "real" subject is a noun and not the whole sentence)

example: "It is important, who will come."

obviously it is not the (unknown) person that is important, but
which realization of several possibilities is going to be true


SuStel provided this translation K->E:
> >"They did not know that how had this happened?"
> 
> The insertion of "that" is not always implied by the use of 'e'.  An
> example from TKD: yaS qIppu' 'e' vIlegh = I saw him/her hit the officers.

this is, of course, only a smoother rendering of the more literal

"He hit the officers. I saw that." or
"I saw that he hit the officers."

The fact that English allows you to drop the WORD "that" doesn't
mean you're dropping its FUNCTION.

> Also the order of "had this" is not implied by the Klingon.  So a more
> accurate translation would read: "They did not know how this had

Translated as a question followed by a sentence reffering to it, you get:

"How had this happened? They did not know that."

which shows me that the ordering SuStel gives is EXACTLY what is implied
by the Klingon.

> happened."  Which is exactly what I was trying to say.  Notice also that
> TKD says that 'e' is often used with verbs such as" know", "see".  The
> verb I used was "know".  It seems to fit TKD's criteria.
> 
it does NOT say, however, that any such use makes sense

HomDoq

Back to archive top level