[Tlhingan-hol] vulqa'nganpu'

[Will Martin]

Okay, I’ll try to get more to the point and explain the details of my objection to De’vID’s proposed expansion of Sentence As Object (SAO) grammar.

I look at: {qama’pu’ DIHoH ‘ej ‘e’ luSov}. I honestly don’t begin knowing how to translate it, so let’s compare it to {qama’pu’ DIHoH ‘e’ luSov}, which I can easily translate.

What does the latter mean?

"They know that we kill prisoners.” This is how Okrand shows us it should be translated.

So, what does that imply about what the former means?

“They know and that we kill prisoners.”

I don’t understand what the conjunction is doing here.

Or maybe it should be:

“They know that and we kill prisoners.”?

Okay, what is “that” referring to? Something stated before this whole sentence? The “that” and the “and” don’t really work that well together.

This is what I mean when I say this is weird. In order to interpret {qama’pu’ DIHoH ‘ej ‘e’ luSov} the way it has been argued it should be interpreted, one must put aside all that we know about how SAO is translated and start over with some new, unexplained method of translation.

De’vID argues that we are supposed to translate it as “We kill prisoners and they know it.” He replaces the “that” which has been our primary tool for translating SAO with “it”, and we’ve dropped the reversal of the two sentences in translation.

If we take these same principles and apply them to the example we have been given in The Klingon Dictionary (TKD), this implies that {qama’pu’ DIHoH ‘e’ luSov} should be translated as “We kill prisoners they know it.” But that’s not a single, well-formed sentence in English, and we’re told that SAO in Klingon is translated as a single sentence.

We know that the literal translation of SAO in Klingon is “We kill prisoners. They know [that],” with [that] being a special pronoun that refers back to the previously stated, separate, whole sentence. But De'vID argues that we should translate this with no problem by adding a conjunction, so literally, it’s “We kill prisoners, and they know [that],” with [that] referring back to the first half of the compound sentence.

So, basically, he’s looking at SAO in TKD as far as the literal translation of the Klingon goes and then stops paying any attention to the rest of the description of how it is supposed to be translated, and then makes up his own new way to finish the process of translation so that he can wedge a conjunction into it and it will still make sense.

So, the result is something that we can’t translate the way that we are told to translate SAO. We have to change the way the English translation appears to be more like the literal Klingon translation, and we have to tweak what {‘e’} refers to; to adjust it to include something that we’ve never been told it’s okay to have it refer to.

Maybe it CAN refer to the first half of a compound sentence containing {‘e’}, but if it can, one would expect Okrand to do a better job of showing us a clear example with a clear translation, since the method of translating it we HAVE been given doesn’t work for this example.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv