[Tlhingan-hol] vulqa'nganpu'

[SuStel]

On 1/5/2016 9:59 AM, Will Martin wrote:
> 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.

Trying to form good Klingon by manipulating the English translation is 
doomed to failure. You're the one who's fond of telling people that 
Klingon is not coded English; take your own advice. Focus on the 
meaning, not the 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.

*shrug*
"We kill prisoners and they know that."

> 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.

No, we're told that "What is a single sentence in English is often two 
sentences in Klingon." Not the same thing at all.

> 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.

He's not looking at the translation at all; he's looking at what it 
means in Klingon. He simply provides the most colloquial translation 
after the fact.

In any case, I don't even see that your argument based on translation is 
correct. If we were to base this on the English translation, we'd get

S1: qama'pu' DIHoH
     we kill prisoners
CJ: 'ej
     and
S2: 'e' luSov
     they know that
     they know that [we kill prisoners]

This is exactly what we were looking for. {'e'} refers to the previous 
sentence, S1. Nothing in TKD says a conjunction can't come between the 
two sentences. TKD never says the two sentences must be immediately next 
to each other, without the possibility of a non-sentence in between. TKD 
DOES say that it presents only a "brutish" level of grammar, so one must 
expect some fine details to be absent such as, perhaps, conjunctions 
between the two sentences of a sentence-as-object.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name