tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jun 26 13:02:18 2011

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Re: chomuSHa''a'? ghorgh chomuS!? - Question about muSHa'

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv ([email protected]) 

This is the real challenge to dealing with a FICTIONAL artificial language. It's not a code for English. It's a language. But there are no native speakers. And there are some concepts that are alien enough that they don't translate well. People who use the language evolve an understanding over time for the way certain things feel, but if Okrand subsequently interprets things differently, suddenly, that feeling is not altogether valid. This can be pretty hard to take. Been there. Done that. Nobody made a T-shirt, so I have nothing to show for it.

It's clear that {-Ha'} is not fully explained by Okrand, but it is in common-enough use that we all get comfortable using it in most settings, but then there are other contexts where it is not so clear and some of us will make one interpretation while others make a different one, and none of us except Okrand (who probably doesn't care all that much in an average day) can say for sure who is right.

Welcome to tlhIngan Hol. The Land of Irreconcilable Arguments. It's a good thing it's a warrior's tongue. We fight over it often enough...

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv
[email protected]



On Jun 26, 2011, at 2:04 PM, Felix Malmenbeck wrote:

>> lo'vam Daparchugh, yIlo'Qo'. lo'vam Dayajchugh, yIbepQo'.
> 
> jIbepbe' neH. lo'vam vIparchu'be' 'ach Daj 'e' vIQub. tlhIngan Hol SovwIj vIDubmeH latlh vuDmey vIlaD vIneH.
> 
>> I like to think that {-Ha'} means only one thing, but no single English word
>> translates it. We stretch the idea in one direction or the other by
>> translating it either as "undo" or as "wrongly", where it really ought to be
>> more like both at the same time.
> 
> I'm tempted to agree with you on this. When a verb describes a state that lies on a continuum, I often interpret the -Ha' as implying that one is somehow on both halves of the spectrum. For example, somebody who thinks one is happy but is dead inside could perhaps be described as QuchHa', and somebody who is sad for no reason may be 'IQHa'. That being said, examples like parHa' seem to go against this interpretation...  ...at least if one assumes that Klingons use the words par and parHa' the same way we use the words "dislike" and "like", which, of course, is far from certain.
> 
>> {muSHa'} definitely doesn't always mean the same thing as "love", but I can
>> imagine a situation where both words can be appropriate expressions of the
>> same concept.
> 
> Agreed; I think something like this seems to show up both in the works of Shakespeare (Sonnet 147, for instance) and Hugh Grant (Generic Hugh Grant Movie #47, for instance), where a person finds another not so much in spite of as because of the fact that he/she is completely despicable to him/her.
> I've actually used the word "hatkärlek" ("hate-love"; comparable to the English word "love-hate", but in my experience used slightly differently) to describe tasks which I've found refreshingly infuriating; this could perhaps be seen as one form of muSHa'ghach.
> 
> Moby-Dick muSHa''a' Ahab HoD.
> 
>

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