tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 19 02:53:47 2001

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philosophy (was Re: Pronouns

batlh ghItlhta' SuStel quv:

>jIQub vaj jIH. 
>
>If you really understand what this statement MEANS (I didn't until I was 
>discussing philosophy with a friend), you realize that the Klingon expresses 
>the sentiment perfectly.  The uncertaintly of the pronoun between noun and 
>verb is exactly what the sentiment requires. 

I wish I could agree. But I don't. The default meaning of "jIH" is "I, me".
What this sentence sends thru my mind is something like, "I think; therefore
me," or "I think; I am a warrior." If I encountered it in unmarked Klingon
text, it would confuse me, save for my familiarity with the English translation.

How do other be-less languages deal with translations of Descartes? I have
limited knowledge of such things, but apparently the guy responsible for
translating Descartes into Russian (which lacks present tense "be") sparked
a huge epistemological debate that continues to this day, even spreading to
countries where they have "be".

Consider: "jIQub, vaj jItaH". That preserves the grammatical parallelism,
anyway, tho it does very little to invoke the metaphysical intent of the
original. Ah well, "I think therefore I am" came out of a very specific
cultural context. It could only have been thot of by a Western objectivist
thinker during the Age of Reason. It would never have occured to Bhuddists,
Hindus, etc., for example. One might even argue that the phrase is cryptic
to even modern-day Western culture. So who knows what kind of enigmatic
philosophical artifacts we'd find among Klingons? Something that is as
bizarre to us as "jIQub vaj jItaH" is to them. What about... hehe.... "vIt
'oH jIQubghach'e'."

Actually, when I think of what "jIQub, vaj jItaH" would mean in a hegemonic
Klingon context, I come up with something like battle-readiness survivalism,
"I'm still alive because I used my head (and didn't let myself get taken by
surprise)."

taD, mightn't you want to take this opportunity to say something to the
taghwI'pu' about how vaj is an adverbial and can't be used to string
non-subordinate clauses like 'ej does? jIQub vaj jItaH... Doh.!@

Andrew H. Strader
  http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~strader

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