[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: He'

[Felix Malmenbeck]

In very free translation:

«roSmeyvaD tlheng'IQ vIponglaH 'ach muDuQ 'e' lumevbe'.»
"I can call the roses "thranxx", but they will not cease to pierce me."

(That's assuming thranxx bushes do not have thorns. Otherwise, replace tlheng'IQ with some thornless plant.)

4 dec 2014 kl. 17:12 skrev Chelsea Knauf <chelsea.knauf at gmail.com<mailto:chelsea.knauf at gmail.com>>:

"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

{'roS' wIpong, 'ej pong pIm wIpongchugh, pIw 'ey He''e' taH}.

Newbie try.  Hopefully somewhere close to correct.

I'd day you're off to a very good start!

I advise against using apostrophes for quotes in Klingon, since they look like glottal stops.
You don't really need anythhing to mark quotes with, but popular alternatives include less- and greater-than signs, <roS>, and guillemets, «roS».

There are some issues with the last part:
pIw 'ey He''e' taH

I suspect that you meant to have a space between He' and taH:
pIw 'ey He' 'e' taH
"it continues to emit a delicious smell"

I'd say that with that change, your translation is good and correct, but there are some things one may nitpick over.

Most notably, both He' and taH take objects in your sentence, whereas I don't believe either has been confirmed to do so.

I think your use of He' is probably correct, but I'm less certain about taH:
One of the translations of taH is "continue", and in English, this can be either transitive or intransitive:
"The discussion continues."
"They continued to discuss."

Notice that in the first example, the subject ("The discussion") is that which keeps happening.
In the second example, the subject ("They") is that which causes it to continue happening.

Other official glosses for taH include "endure" and "survive", which leads me to believe that taH does not take an object (though I could certainly be wrong).

So, I might recommend considering a different phrasing, such as «'eyHa'choHbe' pIw» ("the scent does not become un-delicious") or «taH pIw 'ey» ("the delicious scent endures").

[Another nitpick is that I believe we've only seen 'ey be used to describe food and music, not smells. However, I think we can be fairly certain that it can be applied to smells as well.]
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