tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 21 12:29:13 2001
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RE: quraq's proverb klbc
- From: "Stauffer, Tad E (staufte7)" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: quraq's proverb klbc
- Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 12:29:44 -0400
quraq said:
qorDu' quvmoHlI'
Honor your family
I think you may have accidentally put {-lI'} on the verb, when you meant to
put it on the noun {qorDu'}. If {-lI'} is on the verb, it is a verb suffix
meaning "in progress". If you put it on the noun, then it means "your".
So you can put the {-lI'} on the noun, so that it says:
{qorDu'lI'} "Your family (capable of using speech)"
The verb here needs a prefix to indicate who is doing the action. In the
English translation, it isn't immediately obvious which prefix to use, since
the English sentence doesn't actually mention the subject.
For example, if you said "You honor your family" then we would use the
prefix {Da-}, and if it said "I honor your family" we would use {vI-}.
But the original sentence, "Honor your family", is actually a command, not a
statement. (Sometimes we'll add an exclamation point to the sentence, to
remind us that it's a command.) So here we want to use an imperative prefix.
If we look at the bottom of page 34 in TKD, we'll find that {yI-} is the
imperative prefix when telling "you" to do something to "him/her/it".
For example:
{Duj yIHIv} "Attack the ship!"
So for your proverb, you can say:
{qorDu'lI' yIquvmoH} "Honor your family!"
- taD