tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue May 13 06:22:32 2008
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Re: ngoy'
The problem I see here is that you seem to feel that because English
has a noun form for "responsibility", then Klingon needs to have one,
too. Otherwise, you'll have trouble swapping English words for Klingon
words and then rearranging them for Klingon grammar in order to
translate from English to Klingon.
Meanwhile, that's not a very good way to translate between these two
languages -- or any other language, for that matter. If that's all
there was to it, then computers would be really good at translating.
They aren't.
What you really need to do is practice saying things in Klingon until
you get accustomed to the resources of the language. When you do that,
you'll find that there are ways of saying things with {ngoy'} as a
verb which has the same feel and meaning as the noun "responsibility"
in English. If you can express the same idea in one grammatical
construction with a verb in one language as you express with a noun in
a different kind of grammatical construction in the other language, it
doesn't matter that one word is a verb and the other is a noun, and it
doesn't matter that the grammar is different in the two languages.
Consider how you would translate "Which helmet do you want?" into
Klingon. You won't find a Klingon word for "which". There isn't one.
You can't use {nuq}. It doesn't work that way.
You can say {mIv yIwIv!}
Your right. That's not a question. The original English was a
question. The Klingon is a command. Meanwhile, both of them require
the same response. In both cases, when the sentence is expressed to
you, your response is your choice of helmet. It's a fine translation,
even though it won't satisfy someone who is searching for a question
word for "which".
You don't need a noun for {ngoy'} to say most of the things you'd say
with the English noun "responsibility". Just use the verb creatively.
Meanwhile, if you want to impart a flavor to the word that the English
word "responsibility" doesn't specify, you can use {-ghach} with some
verb suffix preceding it:
ngoy'taHghach - "ongoing responsibility"
ngoy'ta'ghach - "responsibility that continues or continued until a
goal is or was reached"
ngoy'qangghach - "willingness to be responsible"
ngoy'nISghach - "the necessity of responsibility"
ngoy'Ha'ghach - "irresponsibility"
ngoy'pu'ghach - "former responsibility"
ngoy'qa'ghach - "repeated responsiblity"
ngoy'rupghach - "readiness to be responsible"
ngoy'vIpghach - "fear of responsibility"
Some of these definitions could certainly use improvement (and
somehow, I expect someone to offer some, seeing an opportunity to
correct me), but the point is that none of these really means exactly
the same thing as the lone English word "responsibility". That's not
what {-ghach} does to a word. This is why use of the suffix {-ghach}
isn't more common here than you witness it. English speakers really
like nouns. The language is so thick with them. Give an English
speaker half a dozen well-chosen verbs and 10,000 nouns, and they'll
be content to express a wide range of meanings in their sentences.
Reverse that for a Klingon speaker, and they'd be pretty much equally
equipped.
I'm exaggerating, of course, but the truth is, by my quick count,
Klingon has 1,043 verbs and 1,348 nouns. In English, I doubt the ratio
is nearly as close. Your average Klingon speaker has probably
memorized more verbs than nouns. Meanwhile, whenever people make up
their list of words they want from Maltz, they almost always want
mostly nouns. This is especially true, since the people who ask for
the most words are usually people who have used the language less than
most of the other people on this list.
Oh, and I count 674 nouns in TKD and 743 verbs there, so it is likely
that Okrand's original idea for the language was to be very verb-
centric, with more of them in the vocabulary, with more suffixes for
them and with the grammar making a lone verb act as a complete
sentence. He's had lots of requests for nouns since then, and more of
the newer vocabulary has been nouns.
Hmmm. 54 verbs in the Addendum and 118 nouns.
399 nouns in KGT and 213 verbs.
148 verbs in HolQeD and 170 nouns.
Novels have given us 4 nouns and no verbs.
The BOP poster gave us 34 nouns and 4 verbs.
MSN gives 23 nouns and 11 verbs.
KCD gives 14 nouns and 1 verb.
So far as I can tell TKW gave us variations of meaning on words that
are defined elsewhere, but all we got for new words were some proper
nouns and {jajvam}.
Other sources also give 23 nouns and 5 verbs.
These are rough numbers gleaned by computer string searches. If the
numbers were small enough, I further filtered out words that appear in
more than one source.
Meanwhile, as you look at this, realize that most of the words we use
most of the time have come from TKD, where verbs were king.
Hey, I worked hard building a dictionary in Bento. Might as well get
as much out of it as I can, right?
Doq
On May 12, 2008, at 11:55 PM, Rich Timpone wrote:
> ghunchu'wI,
>
> Thanks for the response and clarifications.
>
>> What do you mean? {ngoy'} is only a verb. Because it expresses a
>> state or quality, it can be used in a comparative or superlative
>> construction, and it can be used somewhat like an English adjective,
>> but it is never a noun.
>
> I have made this slip before, and hopefully this time it will
> stick. As you note, ngoy' is a verb and can be used as a modifier
> like an adjective. Your clarification on the notation in TKD helps
> make the point that ngoy' was not necessarily considered to be a noun.
>
> While ngoy' does fit the concept I am thinking of, I am not sure how
> one would reference the noun form of responsibility. I suspect it
> may not be the same term and may be a variation of ngoy' or a
> different term entirely (more along the lines of veS and Qoj than ta'
> or yoD that I referenced in my previous note). If you have thoughts
> on this as well, I would love to hear them.
>
> Thanks,
> Rich
>
>
>
>
>
>