tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Sep 15 20:29:30 1997
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Re: KLBC: vulqanganpu'
muHwI' suggested rendering "Live long and prosper" as:
|><poH law' yIyIn 'ej yIchep>
BG Qov replied:
|Your sentence is an order. The original greeting is more like a wish that
|it be true, no? We have a suffix to express wishes. We also don't have any
|evidence that {yIn} takes as an object the length of time that one lives. I
|use:
| nI'jaj yInlIj 'ej bIchupjaj
|
|Marc Okrand has translated it differently in an article that I am sure
|someone will post in follow up.
You rang?
Actually, Okrand has given us two versions of this. In the BBC "Radio
Times" article, he rendered it (somewhat facetiously I think) as:
yIn nI' yISIQ 'ej yIchep!
which is certainly the Klingon attitude. Klingons routinely wish each other
a glorious and honorable death, not a long life (however prosperous).
Hmmm... I wonder if a Klingon would take this as a curse? He seems to have
translated it more neutrally as:
yItaH 'ej yIcheptaH!
for Leonard Nimoy to say on UPN's 25th Star Trek Anniversary special, on
which I'm told Okrand also appeared briefly. Note that both of these are
also imperatives and not wishes. In fact, we are told specifically that
-jaj may not be used with Type 7 aspectual suffixes (TKD p. 175f).
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons