tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 06 14:04:59 1999
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Noun suffixes, type 5
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Noun suffixes, type 5
- Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 17:04:46 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
- Priority: NORMAL
On Wed, 6 Jan 1999 00:10:49 -0800 (PST) [email protected] wrote:
> 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...
> 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.
Sorry I missed them.
> 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.
I think it is exactly as "forced" to say you use wood to make a
table. Do you use it the same way you use a hammer and a saw to
make a table? This is very different from saying, "I hit the
officer with my sword." There, the use of {lo'} makes more
indesputable sense to me, but to say that you "use" wood to make
a table does not imply to me that the table is made of wood. For
that, it makes more sense to say that the tables matter is a
tree's matter, or to say that it is made FROM wood. You removed
material FROM the tree to make the table. Removing matter from
the tree was one of the steps in making the table.
> " 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."
Well, the meaning I wanted was "extract from, take out of, take
from". That's what you do to the tree in order to make the
table. A Klingon knows that. He doesn't see wood like plastic or
steel. He knows that it is a tree's heart, its flesh, it's
substance that makes the table. The tree died to make that table.
A human might just look and say, "Hmm. Nice wood." A Klingon
sees the wood and knows the feeling of the blade cutting through
living flesh to make it.
> peHruS
charghwI' 'utlh