[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: pagh

[Rohan Fenwick]

jIjatlhpu':
> {pagh} "nothing, none" (n), {pagh} "no one" (n) and {pagh} "zero"
> (num) are almost certainly the same lexeme, so can probably be

jangpu' Voragh, jatlh:
> I take your point, but one shouldn't confuse them when translating
> from Klingon into another language... or relying on an online
> translation program!  E.g.

jang je Quvar, jatlh:
> I guess that Klingons do not think about the different meanings.

I respectfully disagree: polysemy is where wordplay and puns come from. As usual, context is crucial, and it's possible to set up context deliberately so ambiguity remains. In the epic I'm translating, there's a line in which one character makes an accusation to another: <maghbogh ta' vIyajchoHpu'!>. It translates Georgian /shemignia sakme sheni samuxtale/ "I have become aware of your treacherous act", but the person this character is saying it to happens to be an emperor as well, leaving the sentence deliberately ambiguous: "I have begun to understand the betraying [accomplishment/Emperor]".

Unless you're talking only about the meanings "nothing" and "no-one"?

> Many languages have words with different meanings.

Oh yes. In Ubykh the phonological root /la/ represents at least three nouns, five verbs, and an interjection, all semantically unrelated. In Klingon, {ta'}, {taH}, {DIS}, {wej}, and {nargh} are just some I can think of offhand.

> pa'vo' pagh leghlu'chugh, vaj pagh vIlegh: pagh ghot, pagh nuv.

I know you've disambiguated which {pagh} you mean with context here, but I could re-illustrate the ambiguity issue by asking, which {pa'} did you intend there - "from there" or "from the room"? :)

QeS
 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://stodi.digitalkingdom.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20130616/6e039261/attachment-0001.html>