tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon May 28 02:48:34 2001
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A little Poetry
- From: Brion L. VIBBER <[email protected]>
- Subject: A little Poetry
- Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 02:50:24 -0700
Out of an insidious intellectual curiosity, I've been doing a few
translations for this site: http://home.freeuk.net/cadenza/chunky-monkey/
which seeks translations in any language of the following poem:
Chunky Monkey had a cow
But he hasn't got it now
I decided to dust off my old Klingon Dictionary, with which I had had a brief
fling some years ago, and see what I could render into the tlhIngan Hol
(which I can wrap around my brain better now after some decent foreign
language classes) and ended up with something like this:
tangqua ghajpu' mughato' pI'
'ach DaH 'oHDaj ghajHa'qu' ghaH
(I don't think the original English version's meter - trochaic quadrameter
IIRC, DAdaDAdaDAdaDA - would be easy to implement in Klingon, but I think
I've got it working in iambic quadrameter - daDAdaDAdaDAdaDA.)
tangqua and mughato' are vague approximations of cow/bull and monkey/ape; the
creature names are attested in the supplemental vocabulary on www.kli.org.
"Chunky" is in the sense of "stocky, chubby, somewhat fat," which seems to be
adequately translated as pI' or ror.
But before I commit my monstruous creation to the bowels, errr, annals of the
internet, I thought I'd run it by people with a greater familiarity with the
language and see how much dishonor I have brought them. Oh, and ask a few
questions:
- Is there any difference in sense between pI' and ror? Both are listed as
'to be fat' in TKD. I probably could more easily get a rhyme with pI', but I
think meter is more significant than rhyme here anyway and haven't tried.
- Is it correct to put noun suffixes on a pronoun? 'oHDaj - his it? I can
fill the space in with something else or simply leave it out if need be and
have an uneven line length.
- Have I horribly misestimated the stressed syllables? I've placed stress on
the verbal suffixes pu' and Ha' on the assumption that aspect/negation are
particularly important in this case, and thus would be emphasized. I'm also
unsure about the stress in mughato'; I think the stress normally goes on the
last syllable, but I've munged it into the penult. Does this seem terribly
awkward?
- Anything else I've messed up, it would be an honor to be instructed in the
correct manner of saying it.
Well, um, there you are.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)