{je} "too" with doubly {-bogh}'ed nouns
I want to say "that alien is dark blue and he's gray too". According to http:klingonska.org/ref/color.html dark blue: {SuD 'ej Hurgh} or {SuD 'ach Hurgh} gray: {qIj 'ej wov} or {qIj 'ach wov} Now, my problem isn't to discuss colors in klingon (a subject which makes my stomach turn). The thing I'm wondering which is the subject of this post, is this: "That alien is dark blue and he's gray too". When I'll write the klingon constructions which we need to use to expess "gray", do I write the {je} "too" once or twice? SuD 'ej Hurgh nov, 'ej qIj 'ej wov je SuD 'ej Hurgh nov, 'ej qIj je 'ej wov je Which of the two is the grammatically correct choice? -- Dana'an https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/ Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ
I’d like to help, but I’m not sure I understand the specific meaning of your English description of the alien so that I can move from the framework of the quirks of English color descriptions and the quirks of Klingon color descriptions. In particular, are you describing an alien who is one color that could be classified as gray or as dark blue, or are you describing an alien who has different features, some of which are grey and others of which are dark blue? If you are describing one color that could be called gray or dark blue, in Klingon, you’d probably choose black or blue as the base color, perhaps modified, and then compare the color to that of an object that has something close to the color you are seeking to convey to the mind of your listener/reader. If you are describing an alien that has gray bits and dark blue bits, you’d be better off describing the colors and the bits than trying to glom them both together describing the whole alien. English lets you get away with using its wider palette of color words applied to a single entity than Klingon, which requires work just to describe one of the colors. pItlh charghwI’ ‘utlh (ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)
On Jun 2, 2022, at 8:43 AM, D qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
I want to say "that alien is dark blue and he's gray too".
According to http:klingonska.org/ref/color.html <http://klingonska.org/ref/color.html>
dark blue: {SuD 'ej Hurgh} or {SuD 'ach Hurgh} gray: {qIj 'ej wov} or {qIj 'ach wov}
Now, my problem isn't to discuss colors in klingon (a subject which makes my stomach turn). The thing I'm wondering which is the subject of this post, is this:
"That alien is dark blue and he's gray too".
When I'll write the klingon constructions which we need to use to expess "gray", do I write the {je} "too" once or twice?
SuD 'ej Hurgh nov, 'ej qIj 'ej wov je SuD 'ej Hurgh nov, 'ej qIj je 'ej wov je
Which of the two is the grammatically correct choice?
-- 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
On 6/2/2022 8:43 AM, D qunen'oS wrote:
I want to say "that alien is dark blue and he's gray too".
According to http:klingonska.org/ref/color.html <http://klingonska.org/ref/color.html>
dark blue: {SuD 'ej Hurgh} or {SuD 'ach Hurgh} gray: {qIj 'ej wov} or {qIj 'ach wov}
Now, my problem isn't to discuss colors in klingon (a subject which makes my stomach turn). The thing I'm wondering which is the subject of this post, is this:
"That alien is dark blue and he's gray too".
When I'll write the klingon constructions which we need to use to expess "gray", do I write the {je} "too" once or twice?
SuD 'ej Hurgh nov, 'ej qIj 'ej wov je SuD 'ej Hurgh nov, 'ej qIj je 'ej wov je
Which of the two is the grammatically correct choice?
I presume you're aiming for a single color that is a mixture of dark blue and gray, not two separate parts of the alien that are, respectively, dark blue and gray. Don't start your translation using English terms. English color words are too different from Klingon color words. Instead, start over, describing the desired color using only Klingon terms. The color you're trying for might be *SuD nov 'ej qIj* or *SuD nov 'ej qIj 'ach wov* or something like that. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
Colors aside, as far as grammar is concerned, should someone repeat the {je} twice? "ship which searches and locates romulans, and traps them and kills them too" romuluSnganpu' nejbogh 'ej Sambogh Duj, 'ej vonbogh 'ej peqbogh je romuluSnganpu' nejbogh 'ej Sambogh Duj, 'ej vonbogh je 'ej peqbogh je Which of the two would be the correct choice? -- Dana'an https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/ Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ
Dana'an:
Colors aside, as far as grammar is concerned, should someone repeat the {je} twice?
"ship which searches and locates romulans, and traps them and kills them too"
romuluSnganpu' nejbogh 'ej Sambogh Duj, 'ej vonbogh 'ej peqbogh je
romuluSnganpu' nejbogh 'ej Sambogh Duj, 'ej vonbogh je 'ej peqbogh je
Which of the two would be the correct choice?
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? The answer is, in some cases, probably:
qaQaH DaneHbe'chugh vaj qul wIchenmoH 'ej matlhutlh 'Iw HIq yItlhutlh
If you don’t want my help, Then let’s light a fire and drink, Have some bloodwine!
Here vaj seems to apply to both lighting fire and drinking. However, je is a bit special, so I'm not sure how ellipsis works with it. It might be clearer to repeat it. Iikka "fergusq" Hauhio ------- Original Message ------- On Thursday, June 2nd, 2022 at 16.17, D qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
Colors aside, as far as grammar is concerned, should someone repeat the {je} twice?
"ship which searches and locates romulans, and traps them and kills them too"
romuluSnganpu' nejbogh 'ej Sambogh Duj, 'ej vonbogh 'ej peqbogh je
romuluSnganpu' nejbogh 'ej Sambogh Duj, 'ej vonbogh je 'ej peqbogh je
Which of the two would be the correct choice?
-- Dana'an https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/ Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ
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/ Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ
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
On 6/2/2022 10:16 AM, Will Martin wrote:
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?
Here we go again with the effing /arbitrary/ thing again. The boundaries of a sentence are not arbitrary; writers and linguists have been perfecting the ideas and techniques of writing for millennia. I mentioned your ideas about what the word /arbitrary/ means to a bunch of English lit types, and they thought you were nuts. "A sentence is a group of words representing a complete thought" is not the full picture, but it isn't complete bullshit, either. It is a good starting point for writing. A complex sentence may represent a complex thought, full of subtlety and conditions, but it's all still tied together as a unit. A "single thought" may contain multiple distinct concepts. You wanna see a complex sentence that is, in fact, a single thought? Here's the first line to /The War of the Worlds:/ No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. What's the complete thought? It is it is unbelievable that our world could be watched by an intelligence more advanced than ours. It describes the detachment with which we were being watched, when we were being watched, sets up mankind as someone who also watches lesser beings. All of the details are in support of the thought. That's why it's "complete." Can writers do a poor job of this? Sure. What you learned in school was not just linguistics; it was a simplified guide to writing /good/ English. In Klingon, the situation is rather different. We can't pile on so many clauses and still claim to be writing good Klingon. But if we're translating /The War of the Worlds/ or other texts contemporary with it, when it was popular to build very long sentences in English, we must not only translate ideas, but we must also change the complete thoughts of the English into smaller thoughts in Klingon. And if we wish to preserve the point of the text, we must fine a way to tie those smaller Klingon thoughts together in ways that go beyond simple translation. I've had a go at translating this line into Klingon, and while I can translate individual concepts into Klingon sentences, making sure they all tie together to /mean/ the same thing as the original is quite a different undertaking. Good Klingon is structured very differently than good English. That doesn't make structure arbitrary; it makes it language-specific. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On one hand, you are clearly right. On the other hand, the definition of “a complete thought” is exactly as vague as an elementary school kid’s idea of a sentence. It’s like defining an apple as a red thing you can eat. Yes, this is true, but there are red things you can eat that are not apples, and there are apples that are not red, and apples that are not edible. Johnny Appleseed made his living from apples that were inedible. He’s known for apples, but he was actually more of a frontier real estate agent selling otherwise undeveloped land with apple trees on them; less of a folk hero than an entrepreneur during his life. He got folkified later. The first most universal complete sentence that most English speaking humans understand and eventually utter is, “No.” It’s not a noun. It’s not a verb. Most sentences need at least a noun or a verb, though there are plenty of exceptions. One ought to be able to define the minimum skeleton of a sentence and give some rules about how to expand and extend it, but even that task is really challenging, since there are exceptions to most rules you could come up with. I’d start with suggesting that there are different kinds of sentences with different rules for each. There are statements, questions, and answers. There are also commands, but the boundary between commands and questions gets squishy, since a command is a lot like asking if you will do something, and a question is a lot like a command for an answer. Neither is much of a statement. There are also utterances primarily intended to get someone’s attention, sometimes a specific someone, or sometimes the general “anybody who can hear this”. Dogs are pretty much limited to this one kind of sentence, though parents do it a lot, as do kids. Dogs understand, “No,” but as close as they come to uttering it is to growl. Then again, whining is somewhere between getting attention and asking a question or requesting something. For that matter, commands are often whined. In Klingon, the most common type of sentence is based on a verb, which can be expanded to become a clause by adding nouns or noun phrases, or dependent clauses, or conjoined clauses. Relative clauses are special, since they involve a noun that already has a subject or object role in the main clause. Blah, blah, blah. It gets complicated. Kids learn languages more often than adults, and they do so without analyzing the grammar to death. They learn by trying to say something and either enjoying communication or adapting to corrections. I wish more adults learned Klingon this way. pItlh charghwI’ ‘utlh (ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)
On Jun 2, 2022, at 10:58 AM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
On 6/2/2022 10:16 AM, Will Martin wrote:
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? Here we go again with the effing arbitrary thing again. The boundaries of a sentence are not arbitrary; writers and linguists have been perfecting the ideas and techniques of writing for millennia. I mentioned your ideas about what the word arbitrary means to a bunch of English lit types, and they thought you were nuts.
"A sentence is a group of words representing a complete thought" is not the full picture, but it isn't complete bullshit, either. It is a good starting point for writing. A complex sentence may represent a complex thought, full of subtlety and conditions, but it's all still tied together as a unit. A "single thought" may contain multiple distinct concepts.
You wanna see a complex sentence that is, in fact, a single thought? Here's the first line to The War of the Worlds:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
What's the complete thought? It is it is unbelievable that our world could be watched by an intelligence more advanced than ours. It describes the detachment with which we were being watched, when we were being watched, sets up mankind as someone who also watches lesser beings. All of the details are in support of the thought. That's why it's "complete."
Can writers do a poor job of this? Sure. What you learned in school was not just linguistics; it was a simplified guide to writing good English.
In Klingon, the situation is rather different. We can't pile on so many clauses and still claim to be writing good Klingon. But if we're translating The War of the Worlds or other texts contemporary with it, when it was popular to build very long sentences in English, we must not only translate ideas, but we must also change the complete thoughts of the English into smaller thoughts in Klingon. And if we wish to preserve the point of the text, we must fine a way to tie those smaller Klingon thoughts together in ways that go beyond simple translation. I've had a go at translating this line into Klingon, and while I can translate individual concepts into Klingon sentences, making sure they all tie together to mean the same thing as the original is quite a different undertaking.
Good Klingon is structured very differently than good English. That doesn't make structure arbitrary; it makes it language-specific.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name <http://trimboli.name/>_______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
Okay, here’s a better way to convey what I mean: I used to date a woman named Marni. She volunteered for the Peace Corps in Malaysia. When she told the natives her name, they laughed because it sounds a lot like “manis”, which is their word for “sweet”. They called her “manis manis”, because in Bahasa (the word the Malaysians use both for their language and for language in general), they repeat adjectives in order to express the concept of “very”. “Very sweet” is “manis manis”. They thought she was very sweet. So, as a student of Bahasa, you could wonder if even sweeter would be “manis manis manis”. And if that works, how about “manis manis manis manis” And how about "manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis"? When does it break and become something that no Malaysian would ever say? And if that’s where you are naturally inclined to go, are you really trying to learn how to speak Bahasa? The effort you are putting into this could be far more effective toward the goal of speaking this new (for you) language well if exerted to simply say a broader scope of other things in the language and check in to see if your multiple paragraphs expressing something in Klingon succeed in conveying the ideas that you were trying to express. For myself, this is hard to do because this forum is open to a group of people most of whom are unknown to me, and whenever I try to think of something I want to say to this anonymous crowd, I’m stopped either by a lack of rich vocabulary in the area I randomly come up with, and/or I fail to come up with something to say that might be remotely interesting to the general public. Most of the ideas I have in a common day are of no interest to anyone I know. Simple example? I just read a note Wilbur Wright wrote during the 1903 experiments in powered flight saying that they figured out that the center of gravity of the Wright Flyer with a man in the pilot’s position was about 24” back from the leading edge of the wing. Next to this, in the book I found this quote is a photograph showing one of the brothers in flying position, and it’s clear that the cord of the wing (the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge) is less than the height of the reclining pilot, likely 4’-5’. Let’s choose 5’ because it minimizes what I’m about to measure. Wings generally have a center of lift 25% of the cord back from the leading edge of the wing. A wing with a 5’ cord has a center of lift around 20” back from the leading edge. That means that on the Wright Flyer, the center of lift is in front of the center of gravity. That means that the Wright Flyer is tail heavy. Since the canards (the “elevators”, or as they called it the “horizontal rudders”) are in front of the wings, that means that they were holding the nose of the airplane DOWN, not UP. Modern canard aircraft never do this because it is inherently unstable — it has no Pitch Stability, and will always, at every second, require pilot intervention to maintain a constant pitch and airspeed. But that’s not the worst of it. The Wright Brothers used circular arcs for the ribs of both the wings and the canards, and the concave face of both of these are oriented downwards. That means that the canards are mounted upside down for their role in pitch control. It would be like trying to fly with the wings convex face upward. And that means that the canards were always stalled. The bottom, concave surface of the canards were consistently engulfed in turbulence with no laminar flow. The quantity of turbulence would be very dynamic, increasing and decreasing to a remarkable degree depending on slight updrafts, downdrafts, or even minor adjustments in angle-of-attack by the pilot, which were already exaggerated because the canards hinged on an axis at their center, instead of near the leading edge. All this explains why the one video they made in flight with a movie camera shows the nose in a constant state of randomly yanking upwards and downwards to varying degrees and frequencies several times a second. It had to have been terrifying to pilot that aircraft. Add that this puts a big, centered source of drag in front of the wings. This would amplify any yaw effects during flight. In other words, they had big problems with adverse yaw, which modern pilots would only partially understand. All pilots know that when you bank for a left turn, the increased lift on the right wing also creates increased drag on the right wing, so while the path of the airplane curves toward the left, the nose of the airplane shifts to the right, unless you correct for this “coordinating” the turn with the rudder. Modern pilots look at the Wright Flyer and notice that until 1911, the Wright Brothers never came up with independent control over the rudder. They just tied it into the linkage for the roll control, which will never work perfectly (though it works well enough for the Ercoupe, or some models of Bonanza). What modern pilots don’t recognize is that when adverse yaw pitched the nose to the right on a left bank, it also moved the stalled canards off to the right, pulling the nose even FARTHER and HARDER to the right, counteracting whatever the rudder was trying to do. That means the Wright Brothers were even MORE impressive as pilots, constantly fighting the Flyer’s natural inclination to yaw into a slip severe enough to crash, or yank itself into a stall or a dive. They did crash a lot of times, though it’s impressive that they flew as far as they did between crashes and crashed gently enough to survive with a repairable subset of the “machine” surviving to rebuild it and fly it again. None of these ideas are explored in this, or any other book I’ve found on the Wright Brothers, and I’ve read quite a few of them. See? 1. That would be really hard to write in Klingon. 2. Nobody here wants to read that in any language. In fact, so far as I know, nobody ANYWHERE wants to read this. I just sit here and think it, compulsively. And no, I’m not an aeronautical engineer or even a pilot. I was a student glider pilot years ago, landing an unpowered aircraft nine times, a little over two hours total in the air. I’m an amateur crackpot with no credentials for thinking anything meaningful about the Wright Flyer. And this is just one of many useless areas of interest, including the Klingon language, which is as inexplicable as anything else in terms of why I think about it. 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
participants (4)
-
D qunen'oS -
Iikka Hauhio -
SuStel -
Will Martin