[tlhIngan Hol] qep'a' cha'maH wej mu' chu' - New Words

[Rhona Fenwick]

jIghItlhpu' jIH, jIjatlhpu':

> Again, you're running into an issue of sense there. {tap} probably can be used for "crush",

> but only in the sense of crushing garlic cloves, or grapes for wine, or stones for mineral

> pigment, or that sort of thing. To "crush" one's enemies is an idiom in English:

jang nIqolay, jatlh:

> Using "crush" (or other verbs of literal physical destruction) to mean "thoroughly defeat"
>seems like a pretty straightforward metaphor.

Oh, indeed. I suppose I wanted to point out that it's not a good idea to get hung up on which specific English verbs are "permitted" as glosses of a given Klingon verb, since an English verb may itself have more than one sense and the match with the Klingon may not be one-to-one. The question is, as always, whether the *idea* gets communicated successfully within context.

taH:
> Also according to boQwI', there's a canon citation for that meaning: {yIntaH qIrq 'e' vIneH.
> DaSwIj bIngDaq latlhpu' vItap.} "Kirk I want alive. The rest I will grind beneath my boot."
> (Star Trek Constellations p.232)

It's an example like this that would answer the question conclusively. I say "would" because I have doubts that this is actually canon. It's an example I'm unfamiliar with (not at all impossible, of course), but more to the point, the usage of {'e'} with {neH} is at least extremely unusual - I only know of a single instance in canon, from ST6, and that's in a context where I believe discourse factors are in play. Dave Galanter, the author of the story in that anthology, doesn't credit anyone for the Klingon text. Do we know for a fact that Marc is responsible for this?

I should add that this doesn't mean I would have any problem necessarily with anyone using the metaphor in Klingon text, just that the author would need to be conscious that their reader might take the sense more literally in the Klingon.

QeS 'utlh
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