[tlhIngan Hol] ordering and scope of adverbials relative to timestamps

[Will Martin]

Let me be very clear about this:

Klingon is not my language, and I am not trying to stop anyone from saying vague, wittering, indecisive things using the language. That doesn’t mean that I won’t weigh in with what I honestly think is an important link between the culture and language, because if you want to ignore the fictitious world that has a race in it that speaks this language and just be a guy who speaks it, you still have to consider that the guy who created the language was intentionally building a framework of language intended to be used by a culture that had certain characteristics.

In other words, I’m trying to explain to you why this phrase is particularly difficult to translate. I’m suggesting that if you want to say what you are trying to say, there is a way to do it, even though you don’t like it because it doesn’t directly translate into the English equivalent.

Okrand has compromised a lot because the people who paid him to create the language and who continue to pay him to translate stuff are obviously less sensitive to his intentional design of the language to fit his understanding of the culture than he would prefer. The classic example was his focused intent on eliminating the verb “to be”, building that function into other constructions through adjectival/stative verbs, and the use of pronouns as verbs and the use of the topicalizer noun suffix if you have to a second noun that otherwise doesn’t have a grammatical reason to be there..., and then the director of the movie he was working on turned to him and said, “Give me, ’To be, or not to be.’”

The director is his boss. The paycheck comes from the boss. You need to make the boss happy.

I think that the reason we are having so much trouble translating “Almost a year ago,” is that it is fundamentally counter to the culture, and so there isn’t a good grammatical tool handy to translate that phrase. Yes, you can do it, but note that so far, nobody has managed to do it in a way that everyone can agree is grammatically correct and clearly understood.

Yes, Okrand came up with {HochHom} to satisfy a translation request by someone who paid him to translate something that Klingon, up to this point, lacked the vocabulary for. So, there’s a dent in this “may be inaccurate, but is never approximate”, intentional design of the language. But it’s a very tiny tool with limited scope. It doesn’t clearly solve our specific translation problem.

He could declare that {benHom} means “Almost a year ago” and {ben’a’} is “More than a year ago”. Snap his finger and it’s magically true.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can’t do that. We have to wait for tools from him. Note that, unlike the movies or publishers, we do not pay him to do this.

So, how can we work with this idea of communicating from a Klingon cultural bias?

Think of it as an example of analog vs. digital thinking. You could check your tire pressure with an analog meter or a digital one. The mechanism doing the measuring is probably not very accurate. In most cases, you are internally blowing up a balloon or pushing a piston against a spring, and in both cases, it might be off by a couple of psi. Meanwhile, one device shows you an analog dial or slide readout, while the other gives you a digital display, pretending to be more accurate than it is.

If both were perfectly accurate, then the analog version would actually give you a more accurate display, unless the digital one had multiple decimal places, but the readout on the digital one seems more precise because nothing follows that last digit, and you don’t even know if it gives you an average rounding or integer lopping off of values.

English favors analog readout. You can feel the weight of the difference between a couple and a few, or a very few, or quite a few, or kind of a lot, or a lot, or a whole lot, etc. Klingon doesn’t do that. Instead, if there are six or eight of something, you say six, or you say seven, or you say eight, and it doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong. You are decisively stating a number that is in the ballpark — that gives the person you are talking to a sense of scope and scale. And you are done.

You don’t worry about, gee, that’s not really as accurate as it sounds. In English, we are afraid to commit to a number that might not be quite accurate, so we want to weight it with a vague suggestion that includes the entire range of what the true number might be. Heaven forbid we say a wrong, specific number.

In American Sign Language, all the (except the verb “to be”) signs exist for me to say, “My brother is angry because he asked me to help him with his homework and I said, 'No.’” 

Meanwhile, this conflicts with Deaf culture in several ways. They’d say, “My brother (point to a space representing my brother) angry. Why? (sign for past) (step to position indicated to represent my brother) (make generic request sign loosely translated as “Would you mind”) (directional you-me) Help (raise eyebrows as equivalent of Klingon {qar’a’?}) (step back to my original position) No.”

Meanwhile, it violates Deaf culture for me to deny a request without accompanying the “no” with an alternative option (Why not ask Mom?), or a reason why I’m saying, “No.” (I don’t know algebra any better than you do.)

If I don’t understand these cultural norms of communication, then I’m not really using American Sign Language. I’m using Signed English, which is a great way to be ignored by a Deaf person.

Do you want to speak Klingon well? If so, make the best use of the tools the language offers, and lean in toward what limited understanding we have of the culture. It’s a language, not a code, and culture is the main reason that translation between any two languages is challenging. Better translations are done by those who understand both cultures.

charghwI’ ‘utlh


> On Feb 9, 2019, at 10:45 AM, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> Am 09.02.2019 um 15:43 schrieb De'vID:
>> As others have pointed out, just because there's a stereotype about a *culture* doesn't mean that you can't say things in the *language* of that culture which go against that stereotype.
> [...]
>> "almost a year ago" is specifically important in the context of the conversation I was having. You're arguing about an answer to a different question than the one I asked.
> 
> Indeed. And nobody has given an answer to the question, which I think is still interesting to know.
> 
> -- 
> Lieven L. Litaer
> aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"
> http://www.klingonisch.de
> http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/StarTrekDiscovery
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org