tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 26 21:09:43 2003
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: QongDaqDaq
ja' qurgh <[email protected]>:
>On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, David Trimboli wrote:
>
>> It doesn't HAVE tense. Time is determined purely by context, of which this
>> sentence has none.
>
>I know it doesn't have tense, hence the reason my mind doesn't see it,
>what I was questioning was how the translation suddenly gained tense...
In English, you can't avoid assigning a tense to a statement. Narratives
in English are traditionally in past tense. That's all. If it bothers you
much, you can translate everything in the manner of newspaper headlines, or
stage directions in a screenplay.
puvchoH bo'Degh
BIRD STARTS TO FLY
It reads like present tense, but screenplays almost never refer to
something happening in the present. Just recognize that a smooth
translation into English will pin things down a bit further than is
actually present in the Klingon, and the choice of what tense to write in
is up to the person writing.
And recognize that the Klingon quite often doesn't mean "one of 'the bird
started flying' or 'the bird starts flying' or 'the bird will start
flying'" -- without a constraining context, it means all of them at once.
Wrapping your brain around the possibility that there just plain *isn't*
any tense there is an interesting exercise.
>Well, my English teacher who taught me while I was growing up in England
>told me specfically to never start a sentance with a conjunction. It's bad
>grammer...
Your English teacher, like many English teachers in the world, took what
was a matter of style and presented it as a rule. There's no grammatical
reason to avoid beginning sentences with conjunctions.
>As for biblical translators, someone needs to teach them how to translate..
wejpuH. Biblical Hebrew uses "and" as the first character of a sentence
regularly. A good translation reflects that, even though it probably was
usually intended more of an "and then" than just "and".
>> I see no reason to assume that Klingon can't use sentence conjunctions at
>> the beginning of sentences, especially when there are previous sentences in
>> the utterance.
>
>Hmm... a conjunction implys a joining of two sentances, why would a
>Klingon waste time using a conjunction is there was no other sentance to
>connect to?
See the words "previous sentences" in the previous sentence.
-- ghunchu'wI'