tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 29 19:19:17 1998
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Re: prepositional phrases
ja' "Avraham Chapman" <[email protected]>:
>As a learning exercise, I've been translating Doctor Seuss' 'The Cat and
>the Hat'.
<voice="George Takei">Oh, my.</voice>
I've always maintained that translating poetry into Klingon is not a
productive learning exercise. Translating something as stylistically
interesting as "The Cat in the Hat" is likely to be an exercise in
frustration; it takes someone who's already good at composing poetry
in the target language to do it well.
And having the phrase "the cat in the hat" as one of my pet irritants
doesn't help things much.
>Unfortunately, he uses a lot of prepositional phrases and I
>don't know how to do them.
In general, what would be a prepositional phrase in English is expressed
by the noun-noun construction in Klingon (see TKD p.31, near the bottom).
{DaSmeymaj bIng} "under our boots"
{lojmIt retlh} "beside the door"
{veH Hur} "outside the boundary"
{nachchaj Dung} "over their heads"
> Specifically, I'm looking for 'in the NOUN'
>where NOUN = any noun.
However, this specific phrase is generally translated using the multi-
purpose locative noun suffix {-Daq}. {yIQDaq} "in the water" tells
where the action of a sentence occurs; it's not necessarily the right
way to talk about "the ship in the water", and many people think it's
absolutely wrong to say *{mIvDaq vIghro'} for "the cat in the hat".
Be aware that there's some debate over this topic.
> I'm also looking for how to say, 'too much of
><something>'.
Where English says "too much", Klingon often merely emphasizes the
quality with the verb suffix {-qu'}. In TKD's appendix of useful
phrases, we find {tujqu'choH QuQ} "the engine is overheating."
-- ghunchu'wI'