[tlhIngan Hol] relative clauses with {Hoch} in noun-noun constructions

[Will Martin]

Answering a question different than you asked, I’d translate the English, “The origin of everything which exits the mouth is the heart,” into the Klingon:

Hoch mu’ luwIv tIq.

It fulfills the Klingon aversion to being “vague, wittering and indecisive”. It doesn’t wander through a pile of extra words.

Meanwhile, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that I am more often happy when I think of something to say and stop myself from saying it, than I am when I think of something to say and say it. (I’m sure I would have been happier if I hadn’t written this message and thus had avoided dealing with responses to it, for instance. Notice that I don’t write to this list NEARLY as often as I once did.) Essentially, my heart stops my words, which the mind has chosen.

mu’ luwIv yab, ‘ach jIjatlhpa’, tIqmo’ ngab ‘op mu'.

As for your question, Okrand has said that Klingon speakers often express a single English sentence as multiple Klingon sentences to avoid grammatical complexity. This is particularly true with attempts to extend Relative Clauses beyond the simple examples we’ve been given. Ditto for Comparatives, and other constructions that linguists, in particular, so often seek to extend to the breaking point.

I’m not telling you that you can’t do it. I’m just suggesting that you might be wiser, were you to seek grammatically simpler methods of expressing meaning. Certainly, your Klingon sentences would be misunderstood less often.

But that assumes that your goal is to be understood clearly in Klingon, and I will confess that it is a weak assumption.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Jan 6, 2020, at 9:01 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I found the sentence, which led me to creating this thread.
> 
> Recently, I wrote:
> 
> tIq 'oH nuj 'elHa'bogh Hoch mung'e' 
> 
> Translated in the "usual" way, then it means: "each origin which exits the mouth is the heart".
> 
> Which doesn't make sense.
> 
> But there's the "alternate" translation, which goes: "the origin of everything which exits the mouth is the heart".
> 
> Is this alternate translation possible ?
> 
> ~ mayqel qunen'oS
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