does someone vor a disease or a person ?
All these years I took for granted, that the object of vor can be either the patient or the disease. But only recently I realized, that in the Ca'Non example of {Hoch vor Dargh wIb} the translation is given as "sour tea cures everything", and not as "sour tea cures everyone" (with the "everyone" referring to patients). So one *could* wonder whether we could indeed use the {vor} to say things like {nuv rop vorta' Qel} "the doctor cured the patient". ~ Qa'yIn
On Tue, 4 Aug 2020 at 14:05, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
All these years I took for granted, that the object of vor can be either the patient or the disease.
But only recently I realized, that in the Ca'Non example of {Hoch vor Dargh wIb} the translation is given as "sour tea cures everything", and not as "sour tea cures everyone" (with the "everyone" referring to patients).
{nuvvaD rop vor Qel} ghaytan jatlhlu'. So one *could* wonder whether we could indeed use the {vor} to say
things like {nuv rop vorta' Qel} "the doctor cured the patient".
'Iv rop vorta' Qel? 'orwI'vaD 'Iv rop vorta' Qel. ({'Iv} latlh jIyweS yIqel.) -- De'vID
De'vID:
{nuvvaD rop vor Qel} ghaytan jatlhlu'.
This is an interesting suggestion. I hadn't thought of this possibility. De'vID:
'Iv rop vorta' Qel? 'orwI'vaD 'Iv rop vorta' Qel. ({'Iv} latlh jIyweS yIqel.)
I'm afraid I can't quite understand what you're trying to show me. "The disease of who has cured the doctor" ? "The disease of who has the doctor cured for the pilot" ? These sentences remind me of the Ca'Non {matlh rop} "maltz disease". But other than that I can't think of anything else. ~ Qa'yIn
On Tue, 4 Aug 2020 at 15:39, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
De'vID:
{nuvvaD rop vor Qel} ghaytan jatlhlu'.
This is an interesting suggestion. I hadn't thought of this possibility.
De'vID:
'Iv rop vorta' Qel? 'orwI'vaD 'Iv rop vorta' Qel. ({'Iv} latlh jIyweS yIqel.)
I'm afraid I can't quite understand what you're trying to show me.
"The disease of who has cured the doctor" ? "The disease of who has the doctor cured for the pilot" ?
These sentences remind me of the Ca'Non {matlh rop} "maltz disease". But other than that I can't think of anything else.
{'Iv rop} "altitude sickness" -- De'vID
De'vID:
{'Iv rop} "altitude sickness"
I'd totally forgotten this meaning of {'Iv}. However, returning to the original question, I still wonder whether one could vor a person too.. I marrion-webstered the english verb "cure", and as it seems, it can be used in reference to both persons and diseases. Of course, the question would be whether its' klingon counterpart behaves the same way too. ~ Qa'yIn
You’ve hit the biggest problem with the glosses in the word list. We are left to watch canon and otherwise make assumptions about what objects are appropriate for any given verb. Usually it matches English, but not always. Many people have read the gloss for {vIH} and assumed that it takes an object, when we learned years after TKD was published that if A moves B, the verb is {vIHmoH}. So, if we can’t always tell whether a verb takes an object at all, how are we supposed to know which objects are appropriate for each verb? We usually don’t. We guess. charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.
On Aug 4, 2020, at 8:05 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
All these years I took for granted, that the object of vor can be either the patient or the disease.
But only recently I realized, that in the Ca'Non example of {Hoch vor Dargh wIb} the translation is given as "sour tea cures everything", and not as "sour tea cures everyone" (with the "everyone" referring to patients).
So one *could* wonder whether we could indeed use the {vor} to say things like {nuv rop vorta' Qel} "the doctor cured the patient".
~ Qa'yIn _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
On Tue, 4 Aug 2020 at 23:17, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
Many people have read the gloss for {vIH} and assumed that it takes an object, when we learned years after TKD was published that if A moves B, the verb is {vIHmoH}.
chay'?! TKD-Daq "move, be in motion" tu'lu'. vIHba' SeSor. -- De'vID
On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 5:32 PM De'vID <de.vid.jonpin@gmail.com> wrote:
chay'?! TKD-Daq "move, be in motion" tu'lu'. vIHba' SeSor.
http://klingonska.org/canon/1998-12-holqed-07-4.txt WM: I see that you need to strike a balance between restricting yourself by
making unnecessary claims about the language that do not ultimately prove to be accurate and giving people enough information, especially about particular verbs that are problematic so that people can feel more confident about what they are doing with the language. I think about verbs like {vIH} - "move, be in motion," which, depending on which way you see it, you could believe that the word "move" is there just to help you look it up.
MO: A lot of the definitions are there just to help you look them up. We're not just talking about transitivity. In general a lot of things are there because if I'm looking for a word in Klingon, I've got to have an English tag so I can find it. The best definition might not be a good tag. Once you find the tag, then you can hopefully find the better definition.
WM: That makes sense with {vIH} in particular because "be in motion" is not necessarily something that you could look up. But "move" would.
MO: Right.
WM: People have interpreted that to mean both "move" and "be in motion."
MO: I'll tell you what the intent was. The intent was "be in motion."
WM: So if I were to say, "I move this glass," it would be {HIvje'vam vIvIHmoH}.
MO: Right. Though, again, down the road... What I've learned is to never say never.
charghwI':
You’ve hit the biggest problem with the glosses in the word list. We are left to watch canon and otherwise make assumptions about what objects are appropriate for any given verb.
Indeed. And that's exactly the problem; we have to guess and proceed, guess and proceed, guess and proceed.. And in the end habits are formed, habits which are hard to break, when we receive some new clarification. This is the classic case, where the words of a professor in my med school come to mind. He used to say: "The human mind has an almost inexhaustible capacity to accept something which is new, regardless of its' level of difficulty. But what is nearly impossible for it, is to un-learn something which it already knows". ~ Qa'yIn
Yep. Another long post from chargwI’. Don’t feel compelled to read it. If you have time and inclination, enjoy. Don’t do it in angst. You can skip angst by skipping the message. Every musician knows that unlearning a wrong thing is harder than learning a new thing. That’s why, in practice, the bad temptation is to play a new tune or piece from the beginning, until you screw up and then you want to start from the beginning again, in order to get the feel of the tune up to that point,.. but by getting that feeling again, you also usually make the same mistake again, and once you’ve done it twice, the mistake becomes the way you have memorized that tune. So, a better musician backs up just before the mistake and focuses on playing through the mistaken phrase correctly and does this repeatedly, and once she can reliably play through where the mistake had been, THEN go back to the beginning and play it, until you discover the NEXT mistake. Rinse. Repeat. Consider that in Klingon, this issue is exacerbated by things like… we have published the Klingon Hamlet. It includes things that had not been fully resolved or vetted at the time of publication, since Okrand was not one of the editors. He wants it to be valid, though I’m not sure he’s spent the time required to have read the whole thing, so if he becomes aware of something that might not have fit his intentions for the language, he will tend to try to back-fit things to make Hamlet correct, just like he has back-fit things to make certain movie scenes that got things wrong correct. While this complicates things, it probably makes the language closer to the nature of a natural language. Just yesterday, a friend told me a story about a time when a Black woman — a long time friend of the family — came to visit for dinner and at the end of the meal, she stood up and sincerely asked, “Is you quality or does you stack?” We can make fun of the incorrect conjugation of the verbs, clarifying that it should be “Are you quality, or do you stack?”, but then bring someone from a few centuries ago, or a Quaker from more recent times, and they’d correct us to say that it should be “Art thou quality, or dost thou stack?” In her subculture, her original statement is correct. That’s how most of the people she talks to would say that sentence. Meanwhile, if you have the right context, you understand her, because she’s asking whether, in this household [as in a quality establishment], does each person carry her dirty dishes individually to the kitchen, or do you collectively stack the plates here at the table and carry the stack to the kitchen? She wanted to know the house rules for cleaning up. Then there’s the pair of sentences that I feel certain I heard for the first time in the history of time: “We can’t do popcorn. The chickens are too short.” It made perfect sense in context. We were practicing for a performance of “rapper”, a British form of sword dancing, where five dancers hold what they call swords, though they are actually metal straps used by coal miners to scrape the sweat off of the mules that carry the coal carts out of the mines. These are very flexible straps with a swivel-handle on one end and a non-swivel handle on the other, Each dancer holds one end of a sword in each hand, the other ends of which are held by two other dancers. They do complex figures without anybody releasing the swords. Each of of these figures have names. One figure is called “popcorn”, because every other dancer jumps up while the other dancers sweep the swords under their feet, then the dancers who swept the swords duck while the jumping dancers sweep their swords over the ducking dancers, and then the sweeping dancers jump while the previously jumping dancers sweep their swords under… The alternating jumping and ducking of every other dancer looks like popcorn being popped, hence the name. As a prank, we made up a skit where we start to set up for a dance and one of the dancers says, “Sue, do you have the swords?” Sue says, “I thought YOU brought the swords. Does anybody have the swords?” Then everybody starts searching around, taking opportunities to do silly things with members of the audience (this is street theater, so we’re all on a plaza or some such). Then Sue opens up her backpack and pulls out five rubber chickens. So, we were practicing with rubber chickens instead of swords, and we were figuring out what dances we could do with them, when somebody said, “We can’t do popcorn. The chickens are too short.” So, given these two experiences where otherwise cryptic English sentences made perfect sense in context, one should come to a greater understanding of Okrand’s repeated emphasis on the importance of context. Much of the arguments here seem based on the holy grail that is the perfect Klingon sentence that can convey complete, accurate, unambiguous meaning without context. The definition of a sentence as representing “a complete thought” is absurd. Most sentences vaguely point toward an incomplete thought highly dependent upon context to give it greater specificity, and we are content if the listener/reader comes close enough to understanding what we intended to convey without it becoming an argument over what we meant when we stupidly said whatever it was we said. We speak in paragraphs and whole diatribes in order to point toward the same idea from different angles because language is such a remarkably incomplete form of communication. The greater fact is, if we really wanted to be able to speak Klingon well, instead of fixating on individual utterances, we’d do the thing most of us, including myself, are too lazy to do, and that is write or speak in sufficient volume to convey our meaning well, with or without highly complex sentences or arcane details of grammar. It takes more time than I have. It takes more time than YOU have. I still have deep respect for HoD Qanqor when he took the vow and wrote nothing on this list in English. Every word was in Klingon. I learned more about the language in that one month than I’ve learned in the years before or since. I doubt that the experience would have been as educational if I had not been assigned the task of translating everything he said for members of the list whose skill was insufficient to have understood him, because without that responsibility, I probably would have been lazy enough to have not read everything he wrote. charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.
On Aug 5, 2020, at 5:28 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
charghwI':
You’ve hit the biggest problem with the glosses in the word list. We are left to watch canon and otherwise make assumptions about what objects are appropriate for any given verb.
Indeed. And that's exactly the problem; we have to guess and proceed, guess and proceed, guess and proceed.. And in the end habits are formed, habits which are hard to break, when we receive some new clarification.
This is the classic case, where the words of a professor in my med school come to mind. He used to say:
"The human mind has an almost inexhaustible capacity to accept something which is new, regardless of its' level of difficulty. But what is nearly impossible for it, is to un-learn something which it already knows".
~ Qa'yIn _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
participants (4)
-
De'vID -
mayqel qunen'oS -
nIqolay Q -
Will Martin