tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Feb 01 07:52:42 1999
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RE: Klingon in the News
> And, no. I did not understand many arbitrary usages in Hamlet until I
cheated
> and looked at the English side. Even then I often wondered how the
"experts"
> had chosen those constructions.
You have to remember that we have a lot more canon now than we did when
Hamlet was written, and our skills as a community have increased
substantially. Readers of Hamlet can appreciate the difficulty of
expressing complex ideas with less knowledge of the language than we have
now, and I think it was done exceptionally well considering.
It is also not supposed to read like the Kronos Daily Times. This was one
of the diffuclt tasks for me as an editor for Hamlet; while the grammar and
meter would be fine, the sentence would still sound...stilted. But you have
to remember it's this way on purpose. It's supposed to hit you the same way
that reading the English does; most of the time you get it, it sounds odd,
but it's understandable. When you read the English version, do you always
understand every word? Unless you have a Masters degree in English lit, I
doubt it.
I'm not suggesting that we don't comment on strange usage in Hamlet. But I
don't think we ever suggested that Hamlet should be treated as canon, or
that everything in there is fine for common usage. Even now I often wonder
whether the "critics" get this.
> peHruS
-- Holtej