[tlhIngan Hol] "The Duke yet lives that Henry shall depose..."

SuStel sustel at trimboli.name
Fri Jul 16 16:57:22 PDT 2021


On 7/16/2021 7:05 PM, De'vID wrote:
> This came up in a conversation and I started wondering how the 
> original Klingon version looks like.
>
> If you're not familiar with Shakespeare, the sentence is ambiguous. It 
> can be interpreted to mean "The Duke, whom Henry will overthrow, is 
> still alive" or "The Duke, who will overthrow Henry, is still alive".
>
> I don't know what Klingon rank got mangled into "Duke" in English. But 
> what's the grammatical structure that allows for this ambiguity in the 
> original Klingon?

Can't be done in Klingon. Can't be done in colloquial English, either. 
It only works for Shakespeare because poetic English can utilize 
subject-verb inversion wherever it helps the line.

I mean, maybe there's some word with a special double-meaning that might 
trick the grammar into this for just this one instance, but I haven't 
thought of one. But there's no grammatical structure in Klingon that 
will do this.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name




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