It may be the safER choice, but it’s not the safEST choice. The safest choice is to split things out into multiple sentences. This is true in English as well as in Klingon, but Klingon tends to get easier to misinterpret than English as sentences get more complex with more clauses or phrases. It’s never a bad thing to drop back to using a greater number of simpler sentences than trying to pack so much into one. That doesn’t make it invalid grammar to pack things together in one perhaps overburdened sentence. It just makes it harder to parse, extracting the meaning that you intend to convey. Klingon lends itself to multiple sentences tied together with shared context in many cases that English gathers it all together into one sentence. In elementary school, I was taught that “A sentence is a group of words representing a complete thought.” Note: That was complete bullshit. The boundaries of a sentence are arbitrary, and depending on the thought, an entire multi-volume book might be required to represent it, or one sentence might convey a bunch of complete thoughts. I mean, what is a complete thought, anyway? We have sentences and paragraphs. Klingon welcomes conveying more, simpler sentences into the paragraph boundary, while English might pack a whole paragraph into a sentence. Like I just did. The boundaries are arbitrary. Where are the boundaries that you can use to create the least confusion and the clearest conveyance of your intended meaning? It’s more important to contemplate that than to try to maintain the English sentence boundary in a Klingon translation. pItlh charghwI’ ‘utlh (ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)
On Jun 2, 2022, at 10:04 AM, D qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
fergusq:
They are both grammatically correct. I believe what you are asking is does Klingon have ellipsis. If we want an adverbial to apply to the sentences, can we drop it from the other?
Yes, this is what I was wondering about.
fergusq:
However, je is a bit special, so I'm not sure how ellipsis works with it. It might be clearer to repeat it.
I believe so too; now that I'm rethinking this, I think the "safest" choice would be to repeat the {je} twice.
-- Dana'an https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/ <https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/> Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org