tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 05 23:58:58 1999
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Re: Noun suffixes, type 5
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: Noun suffixes, type 5
- Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 02:58:25 EST
In a message dated 1/4/1999 7:47:20 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
[email protected] writes:
<< Are people actually writing this stuff or are you just making
things up to object to? I've never seen anything like this.
Maybe I just was bothered by some earlier part of such a post
and deleted it before reading that far...
> Along this line of thinking, I also dislike Sor Hapvo' raS chenmoHpu' nuv.
> Chinese handles this beautifully without any prepositions (as Chinese does
not
> have any prepositions at all): raS chenmoHmeH nuv, Sor Hap lo'.
Klingon doesn't have any prepositions, either. I don't know any
language that doesn't have prepositional concepts, however, and
it is the use of them that defines much of the flavor of each
language. Meanwhile, the table literally IS formed FROM wood.
You take a tree's trunk and you remove a big chunk from it and
make a table from these pieces that were physically removed from
the trunk.
Much the way that we linguistically separate meat from animal,
we separate wood from tree, as if wood were just some material
mixed up in a lab or mined from deep underground. Meanwhile,
Klingon has one word {Ha'DIbaH} for both animals and their
flesh, and perhaps they remember that wooden items are formed by
removing material from trees.
Meanwhile, I suspect a less controversial and quite functional
casting is:
Sor Hap 'oH raS Hap'e'.
And while we consider castings:
Sorvo' raS Hap lellu'pu'.
>>
I did get these ideas from several posts I have seen in the not-so-distant
past.
As a bilingual speaker of Chinese, I am affected by its constructions. I
still really like "One uses wood to make a table" instead of trying to force
"from wood" into the translation into Klingon.
" Sor Hap 'oH raS Hap'e'. " is a recasting I like a lot, too.
But, I cannot abide "And while we consider castings:
Sorvo' raS Hap lellu'pu'."
Here {-vo'} is not as much a problem to me as is {lel}. I get the feeling
that {lel} means "extract from, take out of, take from" rather than "make
from."
peHruS