tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 22 02:38:54 2000
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Re: tlhIngan-Hol Digest 22 Feb 2000 09:00:00 -0000 Issue 1460
- From: Nick Nicholas <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: tlhIngan-Hol Digest 22 Feb 2000 09:00:00 -0000 Issue 1460
- Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 02:38:16 -0800
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
>tlhIngan-Hol Digest 22 Feb 2000 09:00:00 -0000 Issue 1460
>Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 18:20:24 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
>To: [email protected]
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>Subject: Re: (KLBC) introducing relatives
>Message-ID: <[email protected]>
As SuStel reported, part of the grammar update for _Much Ado_ was
eliminating Question As Object constructions. The revised text (1998-3-8)
has not been published, pending publication by the KLI, and also needs to
be revised to incoporate subsequent developments; but the current versions
of the texts Nicolau cites are as follows:
>> I've picked two exemples from Nick Nicholas'=20
>> translation of "Much Ado About Nothing" (5th revision)=20
>> {paghmo' tIn mIS}:
>=20
>> 2.1, {joH pe'tlho} says:
>> {HItlhej 'ej nuq vIHech Saja'.}
>> "Accompany me and I'll told you what I will try"
>This means:
>"I tell you, 'Follow me, and what do I intend?'"
>Better would have been:
>HItlhej. nabwIj SaQIj.
Now:
jI'elDI' HItlhej, 'ej tlhIHvaD qechwIj vIja'.
>I respect Nick a lot, but in this case I do not believe=20
>that he has accomplished expressing the idea that he=20
>intended to express. You cannot use a question word as if=20
>it were a relative pronoun in Klingon. The grammar has no=20
>place for it.
This was still debatable in '96; now it is an accepted fact about Klingon
grammar. Btw, I don't know if it was Bob LeChevalier, John Cowan, or Mark
Shoulson, but someone associated with Lojban told me last year how
entertaining it was in the early '90s to watch me produce torrents of
texts, find out I was getting some grammar wrong, flip a few switches in my
text generator, and keep on generating torrents of texts. :-) This applies
to my Klingon as well, I guess...
>> 2.2, {joH jon} says:
>> {chay' Dabot nom 'e' HIQIj.}
>> "Explain me quickly how will you prevent it"
>This is explicitly contrary to Okrand's prescription on how=20
>to use Sentence As Object.
>Better would have been:
>wanI'vam DabotmeH mIw'e' nom HIQIj.
In the text, it is now:
chay' Dabot? nom HIja'.
>> And I take from the same source a use of {'e'} I didn't expect:
>> 3.1, {Hero} says:
>> {maja'chuq 'e' 'IjmeH qettaHvIS.}
>> "While she's running to listen what are we talking about"
>Again, that's not very pretty.
>mu'meymaj QoymeH qettaHvIS...
That's actually still the same: maja'chuqtaH 'e' QoymeH qettaHvIS. It's not
intended to mean "to listen to what we are talking about", but "to hear our
talking" (by analogy to maja'chuq 'e' Dabej "you see us talking"). It is
admittedly somewhat awkward, but I don't *think* it's grammatically wrong.
(I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, of course; and it may fall by the
wayside in the next revision.)
>> I know N. Nicholas' version is not the final one of the=20
>> text, but, as long as it is available to everyone under=20
>> KLI's permission and due to it comes from a reputed=20
>> connoisseur of Klingon, I believe in this=20
>> translation.
>We always fall back to saying that it is no' Hol, in order=20
>to give the translators the benefit of the doubt, even when=20
>they have to use a certain percentage of bad grammar to fit=20
>rhyme and meter.
Er, you may do that; to the extent I can at all, I don't allow myself that
priviledge. The proper statement to make is that this represents one
Klingonist's understanding of Klingon grammar as of 1996 (or 1994; I forget
which version's online).
--------------------=================================---------------------
Nick Nicholas; Thesaurus Linguae Graecae http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis
[email protected] University of California at Irvine, USA
"The Orthodox Church lead the Greek nationalist movement in the island
until 1977. Since then it has been in decline, confining itself mainly
to the real estate market and homophobia." (Andrew Apostolou, MGSA-L)