tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 22 15:10:29 2000

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RE: cha'DIch vInID


jatlh HarnIS:
>> tayqeq ta'qangqu' vay'

jang pagh:
><tayqeq ta'nIS vay'> - "Someone needs to accomplish civilization".
>Even with this correction, though, it still doesn't make sense. Read your
>literal back translation - "Someone must be willing to accomplish
>civilization" - and ask what it means. 

If I may pitch in my two cents, this is really an Englishism, or
rather a Latinism.  "Cities" and "civilization" are not necessarily
associated with one another in other languages.  I took a course in
Chinese history and the professor told the class that you can get 
a glimpse of what a society values as a sign of being civilized by 
looking at their word for "civilization".  For the Romans, it is
derived from the word for "city", so they consider people living
in cities to be a civilization.  The Chinese words literally
mean something like "the art of literature", so the Chinese didn't
consider a people civilized until they developed a literature.

Now I know that words in Klingon don't necessarily work in the same
way (since it is an artificial language), but I find it interesting
that <tayqeq> is composed of <tay> "ritual (n), be civilized (v)" 
and <qeq> "military drill (n), practise, train, prepare (v)".  Could
it be that the early Klingons considered a people civilized only
if their practised rituals, and in particular if they ritualized
their military drills?

--
De'vID



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