[Tlhingan-hol] paq'batlh: TO SPEAK TO SOMEONE OF SOMETHING

[lojmIt tI'wI'nuv]

So much of the things brought up in the discussion about these new canon collections makes me feel like Okrand suddenly had to come up with a LOT of canon translations for text other people gave him the English for and he got sloppy. 

Very sloppy.

It's as if we took some arbitrary person from this list -- someone with less skill with the language than many of us -- and told him to make this stuff up.

It's very discouraging.

We get large volumes of new canon full of mistakes and hints at new grammatical constructions without any official analysis or descriptions of grammatical constructions not given to us in TKD or the appendix or anywhere else. So, when we get new vocabulary, how do we know it's not misspelled? When we get new grammar, how do we know it doesn't have editorial errors?

We're left with a mess.

I'm very disappointed in Okrand. We've been very loyal to him for a lot of years now, waiting for each little dribble of vocabulary, and then suddenly a couple of companies toss him some money and he sloppily throws new canon at them that is riddled with errors, and we get to try to figure out this new version of the language without a new TKD to help us understand it.

Perhaps it's just a new game better suited to different players. As one of the founding members of the KLI, I'm having to reevaluate whether I want to play anymore.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



On Nov 28, 2011, at 1:58 PM, David Trimboli wrote:

> On 11/28/2011 1:51 PM, ghunchu'wI' 'utlh wrote:
>> 
>> 2011/11/26 Agnieszka Solska<agnpau1 at hotmail.com>:
>>> 
>>> How do you make of the following line?
>>> 
>>>    Don't speak to me of honor
>>>    quv HIja'chuqQo'
>>>    (pp 156-157)
>> 
>> In The Klingon Dictionary, {ja'chuq} is explicitly analyzed as "tell
>> each other". Marc Okrand once suggested that he would say more about
>> it on the MSN forum, but I don't think he got around to it before the
>> forum vanished.
>> 
>> My first (and extremely strong) reaction is to say the sentence is not
>> grammatically correct. Had I seen it in the draft of the text, I would
>> have had the same reaction.
> 
> It hurts my brain. {-chuq} means the object is "each other," but the prefix means the object is "me," and the actual object is "honor." Ugh.
> 
> The only reason such an icky sentence appears is because {ja'chuq} is translated in the dictionary as "discuss." If that word weren't used, we wouldn't be having this trouble. It's all based on a poorly chosen English translation.
> 
> Finding a better translation would require the context around the sentence, but I don't have the book.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://www.trimboli.name/
> 
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