tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 19 13:17:07 2001

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RE: KLBC: yu'ghach Daj



qonwI':
>   Actually I wasn't asking for an answer, it was just sort of
> "thinking out loud". (I couldn't find a word for "wonder") 
 
taD:
: {SIv} is the verb "wonder". It's one of the words which is in the
: Klingon-English half of the dictionary, but not in the English-Klingon half.
: 
: I believe that "wonder" was mentioned in an interview in an issue HolQeD. It
: was one of several verbs that were used in sentence-as-object constructions.
: You would use it this way:
:   {mIgh qoqlIj 'e' vISIv} "I wonder if your robot is evil", 
: literally "Your robot is evil. I wonder that."

"All four words asked about ({tul} hope, {Qub} think, {Sov} know, and {SIv}
wonder) can be used in the construction {S 'e' V}, where S is a sentence, {'e'}
is the pronoun (that) which refers to a previous topic (in this case S), and V
is one of the verbs listed above (as well as some others). If the sentence (S)
is {tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh} 'you speak Klingon', it's OK to say ... {tlhIngan Hol
Dajatlh 'e' vISIv} 'I wonder if you speak Klingon'. (The fourth example is
weird from an English translation point of view, but it falls right in line in
Klingon. If the English translation matched the pattern of the other three
sentences, it would be 'I wonder that you speak Klingon'. In English, this
means something like 'I'm surprised that you speak Klingon' or 'I don't
understand how it can be that you speak Klingon', but this is not what the
Klingon sentence means. The Klingon sentence means something more like 'I am
curious about whether you speak Klingon'. The clumsiness here is the English,
not the Klingon.)" (MO on st.klingon 7/97)



-- 
Voragh                       
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons



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