tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 14 10:49:36 1997

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Re: KLBC: practise



I'm not happy with my own explanation here, so I'll give a
better one:

According to William H. Martin:
> 
> On Sat, 11 Oct 1997 21:45:55 -0700 (PDT)  Alan Anderson 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > ja' muHwI':
> > >vIparHa' be'Hom 'IH ghaHmo'.

Okay, realize that while you can read right to left, you can't
hear the end of a sentence before the beginning. Each word you
receive needs a context to be understood. The sentence as you
give it parses thusly:

vIparHa' = I like him/her/it/them.

be'Hom = girl. Why it comes here, we don't know. It is in the
subject position for a main verb that already is identified as
having a first person subject. vIparHa' be'Hom. Maybe you are
saying, "I, a girl, like him/her/it/them." Since we can't tell,
we listen for the next word, expecting maybe some sort of verb,
and we do get one.

vIparHa' be'Hom 'IH = be beautiful. But clearly {be'Hom} can't
be the object of {'IH}. So far, the sentence says, "I, a
beautiful girl, like him/her/it/them." It still sounds weird.
Okay, what comes next?

ghaHmo' = "because of him/her" or "because he/she is". Is this a
noun or a verb? It is not immediately apparent. We just had a
verb, so the initial temptation is to expect it to be the
subject of that previous verb, but grammar doesn't allow a noun
with {-mo'} on it anywhere but before the main verb. So, it
must be a verb. But what is it doing here? Let's back up:

'IH ghaHmo' = gibberish. "Because he/she is is beautiful."
Let's back up farther:

be'Hom 'IH ghaHmo' = because she is a beautiful girl. Bingo. Gee,
this was a lot of work. Now, let's look at a different word
order:

be'Hom 'IH ghaHmo' vIparHa'.

Let's take the words, one at a time:

be'Hom = girl. It is at the beginning of the sentence and has
no suffixes that give it any function except object of a verb,
so we next expect the verb to which this is an object.

be'Hom 'IH = Beautiful girl. Obviously, {be'Hom} is not the
object of {'IH}, so this has to be a noun phrase acting as
object of a verb we don't have yet.

be'Hom 'IH ghaHmo' = Because she is a beautiful girl. There is
no other way to translate this and it is easy to figure out,
though it is an awkward way of saying {'IHmo' be'Hom} which is
a more accurate way of saying what you mean.

be'Hom 'IH ghaHmo vIparHa' = I like her because she is a
beautiful girl. Now, we have a specific reference to the person
who is obviously the object of {vIparHa'}, so we know it is "I
like her" and not "I like him". Everything about this is
clearer.

This is why I HATE Qov's tendency to slide {-mo'} verb phrases
to the end of the sentence. Yes, we do this in English, but I
think it stinks in Klingon. In My Humble Opinion.

The point here is that this kind of grammatical choice is a lot
like the hind-sight words ~mark likes to talk about. It is not
enough to write something that made sense while you were
translating in your head from English to Klingon. You must
write something which makes sense to someone reading the
Klingon who never heard your English words.

In English, we tend to put the main verb first and then
elaborate on its settings later. Klingon tends to do it the
other way around:

I'll leave when my captain tells me to leave.

mura'DI' HoDwI', jImej.

I left because my captain ordered me to.

mura'mo' HoDwI', jImej.

I would have left if my captain had ordered me to.

mura'be'mo' HoDwI' jImejbe'.

[I tossed that one in just to show that you can't carry a
pattern too far. Sometimes you need to change your angle at a
given translation entirely.]

I will leave if my captain orders me to.

mura'chugh HoDwI' jImej.

So, don't just keep the phrases where they were in English and
slip the words around into OVS order within each phrase.
Consider where the phrases belong in a Klingon sentence. This
is a big part of translation and recasting.

charghwI'


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