[Tlhingan-hol] Tlhingan-hol Digest, Vol 9, Issue 2

[David Trimboli]

On 5/1/2012 11:20 AM, tlhingan-hol-request at stodi.digitalkingdom.org wrote:
> ghItlhta' SuStel:
>>> They exemplify the structure of Okrand thinking in English and
>>> not considering carefully enough what the sentence actually
>>> means. Is that not obvious?
 >
> That's certainly a possibility worth considering. I really think that
> whether or not you think it's obvious is dependent on whether or not
> you think the sentences are too far off-base to be examples of proper
> Klingon, and I'm personally not convinced; they're not what I
> would've written or expected based on TKD and other canonical
> examples, but they are still very directly tied to a purpose.

Every time Okrand thinks in English when translating to Klingon (these 
are translations, not compositions), the language is in danger of 
becoming more and more English-like when people want to believe that 
Okrand speaks only truth. "Difficult to hit?" got translated the way it 
did because Okrand thought, "Klingon sentence order is English backward, 
so 'to hit' must be {qIpmeH}, and "difficult" is {Qatlh}.

But the "to hit" in the English is *not* a purpose clause. The full 
sentence is either "Is the target difficult to hit?" or "Is it difficult 
to hit the target?" In neither case does the "to hit" mean "in order to 
hit." (*"Is the target difficult in order to hit?" *"Is it difficult in 
order to hit the target?") Interpreting it this way, you're just trying 
to rationalize away the fact that there is no purpose expressed in this 
sentence.

This is further confused by the fact that English "difficult" is an 
adjective, which Klingon doesn't have. Because Klingon uses verbs where 
English uses adjectives, an English adjective with an infinitive 
complement ([adjective]difficult [particle]to [complement]hit) has no 
direct equivalent in Klingon. But if you look at Klingon sentence order 
as backward, and think of "to hit, it is difficult," you're not going to 
see adjective-particle-complement, even though it's still there. Its 
isolation is going to make you see a purpose clause, "to hit" {qIpmeH}. 
Which it's not.

To put it another way: consider the English 
adjective-particle-complement as a single unit. The meaning of the 
adjective and its complement cannot be separated and still have them 
mean the same thing, any more than you can separate the meanings of a 
preposition and its object. The original English is "is the target 
difficult-to-hit?" "Difficult-to-hit" is a single concept. The target is 
not just "difficult"; that means something entirely different. And 
Klingon does not have anything that means "difficult-to-hit."

If this explanation and the sheer obvious English bias of the 
translations don't convince you, what would?

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/