tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 04 22:41:12 2001
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topics of discussion (was Re: tuQaHlaH'a' ?)
ja' SuStel:
>Allow me to suggest a somewhat radical sentence:
>
>jajvetlh quv'e' jIHvaD bIjatlh.
My initial reaction is to wince. I know exactly what you want it to mean,
and I expect that anyone who understands Klingon well enough to translate
the words will know what you want it to mean. But it definitely seems
wrong to me, even before I try to think about exactly *why* it seems wrong.
>A fully-detailed way to say this whole sentence might be, "I'm about to
>focus on honor now: you spoke to me that day." Note that it doesn't
>explicitly say that you spoke about honor, but if the topic of a sentence
>about speaking is honor, it should be pretty clear what the speaker was
>speaking about.
Yes, this argument is the only one I can come up with for why what you're
proposing is worth considering. I'd like to be able to accept it, but
there's one extremely major problem that keeps me from doing so: the word
marked with {-'e'} is *not* actually the topic of the sentence. It's
merely the topic of the conversation that is being referred to obliquely in
the sentence. The level of indirection is too high for me to consider this
as an appropriate tool. It strikes me as marginally ungrammatical, and I
believe it fails to carry the right meaning even if the grammar is okay.
I believe it does *imply* the meaning you want it to, mostly because there
isn't much else that it could mean, but it doesn't meet my personal
standards of clarity. My standards are of course no more official than
yours, so I won't go so far as to state categorically that your proposal is
completely without merit, but I'll not be using it myself anytime soon.
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh