[tlhIngan Hol] law' puS with the -taHvIS and type-9 clauses preceding each element

[Will Martin]

You’ve missed my point. Analysis of a Replacement Proverb is probably futile because it may very well be gibberish that lost its meaning thousands of years ago. We can process the words, shoving them through the algorithm of translation and not actually translate the meaning into anything… meaningful.

I was trying to come up with something meaningful. My bad. 

I retract my earlier analysis, since I was leaning in toward something meaningful instead of leaning in toward something literal.

It could very well mean, “On another person’s face [the fire is hottest.” And we might not really understand what that means, being perhaps a reference to a story long ago forgotten.

In English, when an atheist hears someone sneeze, they might very well say, “Bless you,” out of habit/courtesy or “Ga-Zoon-Height”, even if they don’t know German. This might be like that.

Note that we’re not really told that {X Q law’ X Hoch puS} means X is "Q-er than everything.” We’re told that it means “X is Q-est.” It may look like a comparative, but it’s actually a superlative. It’s not really “The fire is hotter than everything.” It’s “The fire is hottest.” It looks like it’s saying, “The fire is hotter than everything,” but that’s the logical/literal translation, as opposed to a more accurate translation of what we are told it means in Klingon.

… Not that it makes TOO much difference.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.

> On Feb 13, 2021, at 3:25 AM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> TL;DR: You've shown that in other known canon instances of the comparative (except for {Qam[taH]vIS...}), the context in front applies to the entire comparative. Your own analysis of your interpretation of the proverb {reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS}, however, differs from your analysis of the other sentences, and actually applies {latlh qabDaq} only to the first half. (The only way the fire on someone else's face could be being compared to things not on that face is if {Hoch} is outside the scope of {latlh qabDaq}.) You're holding two mutually incompatible beliefs. Your explanation of the grammar of the other sentences differs from your explanation of this one, and so a reasonable conclusion is that this sentence is an exception to the others.
> 
> On Fri, 12 Feb 2021 at 19:02, Will Martin <willmartin2 at mac.com <mailto:willmartin2 at mac.com>> wrote:
> Okrand’s English translation is “The fire is always hotter on someone else’s face.” We should use that as a source of insight as to what the Klingon phrase means.
> 
> There's a line in Star Trek V, {qIpmeH Qatlh'a'}, which is supposed to mean "(Is it) difficult to hit?" According to TKD, {-meH} means "an action is being done in order to accomplish something, or for the purpose of accomplishing something". It's difficult to see how a space probe is being difficult, in order to accomplish being hit. The English sentence provides a source of insight as to what the Klingon phrase *is intended to mean*, but not what it actually does mean, at least according to the rules. The English phrase "for the purpose of" has multiple meanings, only a subset of which is the Klingon {-meH}. I think something similar is happening here.
>  
> The first odd thing to note is that the Klingon is a superlative, while the translation is merely a comparative. {qul tuj law’ Hoch tuj puS} means “The fire is hottest”, not “the fire is hotter”. The translation says, “the fire is hotter”.
> 
> Why would Okrand do that?
> 
> He could have said, in Klingon, perhaps more literally, *reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj law’ qabwIjDaq qul tuj puS.* He could have replaced {-wIj} with {-maj} or some other suffix or otherwise explicitly identified the other faces providing locatives for the other side of the comparison, unless he didn’t want to break up the comparative sentence with a second context-providing locative.
> 
> I don't think we can infer his motivation, and that's not the only possible one. Another explanation is that the English sentence actually expresses a superlative concept despite using the comparative, because of the "always". Something which is "always more X" might just be better expressed as "always most X". But also, even if it had been his motivation, the sentence he ended up with seems to apply the locative only to the first half anyway, as your own analysis below shows.
>  
> In other words, maybe it’s okay to either expand on the nouns, using noun phrases or relative clauses to represent nouns, or to add context to the entire comparison by preceding the whole comparison with context with dependent clauses or nouns with Type 5 suffixes or other “head of the sentence” stuff, but maybe it’s not okay to interrupt the rigid comparative grammatical structure.
> 
> Power Klingon was released in 1993, two years after {QamvIS Hegh qaq law' torvIS yIn qaq puS} was spoken in Star Trek VI. Now, that sentence may be an exception, but it shows that it's at least okay to interrupt the comparative grammatical structure in some (possibly extremely rare) cases.
>  
> So, we’ve been assuming that it might be okay to have the comparative construction interrupted by context-providing stuff that only applies to the second part of the comparison to set it apart from similar stuff applying to the first half of the comparison. Let’s look at voragh’s impressive collection of canon he looked up of Okrand using it:
> [...]
> [The most consistent way to interpret this with other canon example is to have the locative apply to the entire comparative, since we don’t have a grammatical justification for applying a locative to a noun. Locatives apply to verbs, and we have no real explanation of how it could work applied to one or both verbs in a comparative. Using other examples as guidelines, we could interpret it as “At another persons face: “The fire is hotter than everything,” which is how a Klingon expresses “The fire is hottest”.
> 
> Here, I think, is where this breaks down. According to TKD, "The idea of something being more or greater than something else (comparative) is expressed by means of a construction which can be represented by the following formula: A Q {law'} B Q {puS}... To express the superlative, that something is the most or the greatest of all, the noun {Hoch} 'all' is used in the B position". 
> 
> By the rules, the comparative compares something to something else. The superlative is a special case of this, where it's comparing something to everything else (or everything else of its class, going by the examples). 
> 
> If we go by your analysis that {latlh qabDaq} applies to the entire construction, the only possible meaning is: "on someone else's face: the fire is hotter than everything else (i.e., everything else on that someone's face)". That is, maybe there are other fires on that person's face, or there's a fire and some water, but the fire that we're talking about is hotter than everything on that face. I don't think that's what the sentence means, and it's clear neither do you. I think that, in going from the Klingon {qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS} to the English "the fire is hottest" (or vice versa), there is a sleight-of-hand where the meaning has changed, in the same way as between {qIpmeH Qatlh} and "difficult to hit". The Klingon and the English are translations of each other, *but they are not the translations with the right meaning*.
>  
> It seems that we have a choice between interpreting it as “Always, the fire is hottest at another person’s face”, which comes really close to Okrand’s offered “The fire is always hotter on someone else’s face.”
> 
> The English only seems close because its meaning has changed from what the Klingon actually says. If one translates the comparative/superlative construction to be explicit about the fact that it expresses the "idea of something being more or greater than something else (most or greatest of all)", then it would be: "always, the fire is the hottest thing on someone else's face". Now, this does actually come close to one possible meaning of "The fire is always hotter on someone else's face", but it's not the one you're suggesting Okrand intended.
>  
> The other interpretation is, “The fire on another person’s face is hotter than everything.” This interpretation is pretty clearly quite different from Okrand’s offering, and I wonder why we are still suggesting that this is what he meant.
> 
> I disagree that this is "pretty clearly quite different from Okrand's offering". Additionally, I think your translation "Always, the fire is hottest at another person's face" actually *is* this interpretation. The Klingon sentence from which you translated this, according to your analysis, restricts the comparison to the things on someone else's face. (The {Hoch} is within the scope of {latlh qabDaq}.) Your explanation of what you think the proverb means indicates that you think the fire on someone else's face *is* being compared to things not on that person's face ({qul} with the location {qabwIjDaq} or {qabmajDaq}, as you suggested above). But in that case, {Hoch} is including things not in the scope of {latlh qabDaq}, which implies that {latlh qabDaq} is restricted in scope to the first half of the comparative. 
>  
> Note that again, there is no interruption of the X Q law’ Y Q puS structure.]
> 
> < qIbDaq SuvwI''e' > SoH Dun law' Hoch Dun puS
> You would be the greatest warrior in the galaxy. (ST5)
> 
> [Nope. Like the locative in the previous example, there is only one and we’re given no reason to believe that it applies only to the first half of the comparison. We additionally have the topic/focus with {SuvwI’’e’}, but again, that seems to apply to the whole comparison.
> 
> We’re not saying, “You are at your most wonderful when you are among the warriors of the galaxy.” We are setting the boundaries of the entire comparison as being the warriors of the galaxy, and then making the usual simple comparison in the form X Q law’ Y Q puS.
> 
> It’s not “You, a soldier of the galaxy, are the most wonderful.” That totally misses Okrand’s translation.]
> 
> Exactly! Now apply this same analysis to the proverb (the scope applies to the entire comparative).
> 
> Restricting the comparison to in this galaxy, and among warriors: you are the most wonderful; you are more wonderful than any other warrior in this galaxy.
> (parallel to)
> Restricting the comparison to on someone else's face: the fire is hottest; the fire is hotter than anything else on someone else's face.
> 
> And compare this with your previous analysis of the proverb:
> 
> At another person's face: the fire is hottest; the fire is hotter than everything (including fires on my face or our faces).
> 
> Do you see how your analysis of the two sentences are actually different? You've implicitly reduced the scope of the {latlh qabDaq} to apply only to the first half of the comparative.
> 
> What it looks like to me is that you believe that the scope of {-Daq} applies to the entire comparative that follows it, but you also believe that the intended meaning of the proverb is to compare the fire on someone's face to other things not on that person's face (in particular, the same fire on other people's faces). These are incompatible beliefs, but this contradiction isn't apparent to you because the way you've translated the superlative into English obscures this. 
>  
> Any further extensions or presumptive interpretations don’t seem to have a lot of traction until Okrand provides some kind of canon to suggest that it gets more flexible than this.
> 
> I especially have issues with the idea that stuff at the beginning of the sentence can apply to the first half of the comparison and not the second half, since there is no evidence that one could possibly provide such context exclusively for the second half. The comparative structure is not a logical structure. It’s a grammatical fossil. You can’t monkey with it. It is not two chunks of grammatical stuff. It’s one chunk of grammatical stuff. You can add stuff before it, but you can’t add stuff into the middle, and since you can’t add it to the middle, you can’t apply stuff outside of the noun phrase/relative clause to apply to the first half of the comparison without also applying it to the second half.
> 
> In other words, there is no “scope” boundary within the comparative. Any “scope” context applies to the entire comparison. Okrand has never provided us with any mechanism for limiting the scope to the first or second half of the comparison, because all of these grammatical constructions that apply to Klingon clauses apply to the verb, and in a comparative, we invariably repeat the verb. Anything that applies to the first instance of the verb also applies to the second instance of the same verb.
> 
> Okrand has not provided any explanation for any grammatical mechanism for assuming otherwise.
> 
> But if the above is true, then {latlh qabDaq qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS} *cannot* mean "the fire on someone else's face is hottest" in the sense that you've explained (i.e., there is one fire, and it is hotter on someone else's face than on my face or our face). That sentence would only have that meaning if {Hoch} is outside the scope of {latlh qabDaq}. 
>  
> I can see how you logically conclude that there could be scope boundaries within the comparative grammar, but there is no evidence that the unique restrictions of this fossilized grammar fall within the valid realm of your logic. It can easily make sense to you and still be wrong.
> 
> No, you have my motivation backwards. I'm not reasoning from pure logic to how I think the grammar should work. I'm going in the other direction, from the presumed meaning of the proverb, to what the grammar must be to produce that meaning.
> 
> Quoting my first comment in this thread about {reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS}:
> 
> <This sentence seems to be comparing "the hotness of fire on someone else's face" with "the hotness of everything (including one's own face)", and not "the hotness of fire on someone else's face" with "the hotness of everything on someone else's face". That is, the English translation is not "The fire is always hotter than anything else on someone else's face", but is implied to be "The hottest fire is always on someone else's face". The {latlh qabDaq} seems to apply only to the first half of the comparison (the {qul} and the first {tuj}).>
> 
> Now, we both seem to agree that the proverb is comparing the fire on someone else's face with things not on that person's face. Whether it's the same "ONE fire" on the speaker's face, or other fires elsewhere, the point is that these are outside the scope of {latlh qabDaq}. But in that case, that sentence *is* evidence that the scope of {latlh qabDaq} is only the first half of the comparative. I think your own analysis clearly supports this. It's not about whether this makes sense to me, but whether or not we can understand the grammar in a way that's internally consistent. It is not internally consistent to simultaneously hold that the locative cannot apply to just half of a comparative *and* that the proverb is comparing the fire on someone else's face to things not on that face. (Something that makes sense to me may be wrong, but something that isn't internally consistent definitely cannot be right.) 
> 
> I actually think that Klingon is inconsistent here, because Dr. Okrand probably just made a mistake. In the same way that when he was translating "difficult to hit?", he looked up "in order to" and found {-meH} (which is the wrong sense of "in order to"), I think when he was translating "the fire is always hotter/is hottest", he reached for the superlative without thinking carefully through what TKD says about how it works. In other words, {reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS} means "the fire on someone's face is hotter than anything else" (by fiat), even though maybe a strictly conservative application of the known rules doesn't support this. (But it's also possible that he intended the comparative to be more flexible than what's described. The {Qam[taH]vIS...} sentence, at least, suggests that breaking up the comparative sometimes happens, but a conservative approach would treat this and {reH latlh qabDaq...} as fixed exceptions.)
> 
> -- 
> De'vID
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