tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 01 12:42:09 2002
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Re: KLBC: Klingon distress call (updated)
- From: Qov <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC: Klingon distress call (updated)
- Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2002 09:41:24 -0800
charghwI', qaS nuq?
Some years ago when I made a posting suggesting that some of Okrand's canon
was not well-thought out and perhaps should be considered an error, you
verbally attacked not only the idea, but me, so vehemently that you reduced
me to tears, and still make me brace for retaliation when I post.
Yet in the last few weeks you've ...
* argued against a rule:
>chaq ghu' vIDel 'e' vIDubta'. [I know I broke a grammatical rule
>there by using Type 7 on the second verb of SAO. It's a bad rule
>and Okrand has broken it enough times that maybe we should stop
>considering it to be a modern rule. Maybe it is becoming no' Hol.]
*stated that Okrand meant something other than he said he did:
> > Canon attests to "give back" as a translation of nobHa'.
>I'm pretty sure it means "take back", not "give back". To "ungive" is to
>take, not to give back.
The canon, from TKW is Huch nobHa'bogh verenganpu''e' yIvoqQo', which
Okrand translates as "Don't trust Ferengi who give back money." If Okrand
really meant nobHa' to mean "take back" money, it wouldn't be the only
apparent error in the sentence, but the translation would not be a slight
slip, because it's translated again in the text below as "return money." I
don't care that you don't have this bit of canon memorized, but I do care
that you dismissed it as not meaning what Okrand said it meant, without
even looking it up.
* And you made a statement on another list, about vogh, which caused
someone to invoke a name that did give you pause.
When I first started posting to this list, that same person contacted me by
private e-mail, and used some constructions I questioned. He defended them
by saying that this was an oversight by MO, that that was obviously what MO
intended, and that that other rule was unnecessarily restrictive. I was
probably a less impressionable beginner than most, having AVOIDED the KLI
specifically because I thought "they" must be making up their own variant
of the language.
Nothing wrong with changing your mind. I'm not going to claim that I never
get lazy nor misremember canon, nor get my only little pet theories about
how the world of Klingon should be. But if we're going to speak our own
dialects, we can't attack others for speaking theirs.
>That's {Sotlaw'}. Everyone has been misspelling it up to this point.
DopDaq qul yIchenmoH QobDI' ghu'. It's SeHlaw that doesn't have the ', not
Sotlaw'.