(st.klingon 11/1997):
Speakers who do this seem to be aware that they are breaking the rules, so they are doing it for rhetorical effect. (It has the same sort of feeling, perhaps, as if someone were to say in English … “It's lightninging and thundering outside…”)
What is this "this" which speakers do? jIH:
pe'bIl tIH 'oH wa' zeus DI'on''e' one of the characteristics of zeus is the lightning ray/beam De'vID: FWIW, I read your Klingon sentence before your English translation, and I took {tIH} to mean "shaft (of spear)", as though the lightning were a physical weapon which is hurled like a spear, which is pretty much what Zeus does with a lightning bolt.
I like this alternate translation, since after all this is what Zeus seems to do; i.e. throw the lightning as a spear. However, I'd like to take this opportunity to say, that one of the things in Klingon I dislike (and when I say dislike, I mean hate), is when multiple meanings are shoved on a single word. If I say {muD Qun ghaH zeus'e'}, then what do I mean? "Zeus is a god of weather", or "Zeus is a god of the atmosphere"? Now, yes, even in natural languages this can happen/happens, but the tools one has in a natural language (vocabulary + grammar) give him ways to make things clear. Let alone the fact, that in natural languages there are so many synonyms for a number of words. So one can simply choose another word/synonym. Of course, being on this list for almost 6 years, I know/expect that someone will say "context will clarify". But I don't think that a reader is obligated to read an entire paragraph each time the clarification could easily be made, if only we hadn't received a billion different meanings for a single word. ~ Dana'an *zeus is, zeus was, zeus will be; o great zeus!*