tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jun 27 17:07:42 2009

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Klingon translation

ghunchu'wI' ([email protected])



On Jun 27, 2009, at 7:08 PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:

>> Here is such a construction:  "I know who stole the money."
>> Another: "I wonder when the rock will fall."
>
> The second one has an argument for legitimate question-as-object,
> since it could be rendered as "I wonder, when will the rock fall?".

Fine, make it "I don't know when the rock will fall" and that  
argument vanishes.

> [...]
>
>> (Note that these really are the English interrogatives and not the
>> often-identical-looking relative pronouns.  For a clear example of
>> the difference:  "I don't remember what he is wearing."  The word
>> used here is "what", not "that".)
>
> This is still the same problem, though.  What you don't remember is
> not the question, but the answer to the question.

What makes this problem really interesting is that these are using  
question words but they aren't really asking questions.  What isn't  
being remembered here is not the question, true.  But it isn't the  
answer to the question either.  It's at a different level than any  
specific clothing, being something like the entire class of possible  
answers to a question that wasn't quite asked.

I have no concrete reason to believe that the Klingon pronoun {'e'}  
can express this sort of thing.  If it can't, I don't know any other  
Klingon grammar that can do it either.  One would have to recast the  
idea significantly...which is, of course, what I actually do anyway.

-- ghunchu'wI'






Back to archive top level