tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 26 14:52:03 2002
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RE: [KLBC] loQ jIqeqnIS neH
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: RE: [KLBC] loQ jIqeqnIS neH
- Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 19:52:02 GMT
> > > > qavan DloraH,
> > >
> > >Perhaps a , should be put in there because DloraH is not the subject.
> > >qavan, DloraH.
> >
> > But, doesn't the verb prefix qa- already indicate DloraH isn't
> > the subject?
>
> A beginner might think OVS, see /DloraH/ in the subject place and come up
> with "I, DloraH, salute you."
A simple solution to making this more clear is to change the word order:
DloraH qavan.
With or without the comma, this makes sense and means the same thing, if you
can assume that while nouns are usually third person, a person's name can be
second person or even first person. I suspect that people's names act very much
like explicit pronouns in Klingon:
DloraH qavan.
This is very similar to:
SoH qavan. "I salute YOU."
Similarly, I could say:
DloraH qavan charghwI'. "I, charghwI', salute you, DloraH."
If a noun really is the subject or object, it is much better to put it in that
appropriate position in the sentence, whether it is the person being addressed
or not.
> > > > 'ej vaj pIj jIqeqnIS 'e' vIwuqta'.
> > >
> > >TKD p66: ...the second verb never takes an aspect suffix.
> > >So we can't have /'e' vIwuqta'/
> >
> > Ok, right... so... /'ej vaj pIj jIqeqnISta' 'e' vIwuq/ then?
>
> Yes.
While this is more grammatically correct, as a style point, you might want to
reconsider whether you want {-ta'} there at all. Yes, it does indicate
accomplishment and you did start with an English sentence that probably had the
word "accomplish" in it, but I'm not sure that you really intended for this to
be marked as perfective. As it stands, you are saying something like:
"And thus I decided that I must have often accomplished practicing."
{-ta'} doesn't just mean "accomplish". It means "have accomplished". The
accomplishment is complete. It is finished. I suspect you wanted to just say
that you often need to practice. Perhaps you are saying that you have decided
that you often must practice...
It's just that these different grammatical elements seem to crash into each
other without fitting very well. Your thought {pIj jIqeqnIS 'e' vIwuq} is clear
and likely carries all the meaning you need. Throwing in too many adverbs,
conjunctions and suffixes often muddies the meaning. Remember that you are not
encoding an English sentence by packing all of its words into a Klingon
sentence. Carve your thought back to its root and construct the clearest way to
express it in Klingon.
Even if you could say {vIwuqta'}, it would mean, "I had set up the goal of
deciding that, and I have succeeded in accomplishing that goal of making that
decision". Is that really what you meant?
> DloraH, BG
Will