law' puS with the -taHvIS and type-9 clauses preceding each element
You’ve missed my point. Analysis of a Replacement Proverb is probably futile because it may very well be gibberish that lost its meaning thousands of years ago. We can process the words, shoving them through the algorithm of translation and not actually translate the meaning into anything… meaningful. I was trying to come up with something meaningful. My bad. I retract my earlier analysis, since I was leaning in toward something meaningful instead of leaning in toward something literal. It could very well mean, “On another person’s face [the fire is hottest.” And we might not really understand what that means, being perhaps a reference to a story long ago forgotten. In English, when an atheist hears someone sneeze, they might very well say, “Bless you,” out of habit/courtesy or “Ga-Zoon-Height”, even if they don’t know German. This might be like that. Note that we’re not really told that {X Q law’ X Hoch puS} means X is "Q-er than everything.” We’re told that it means “X is Q-est.” It may look like a comparative, but it’s actually a superlative. It’s not really “The fire is hotter than everything.” It’s “The fire is hottest.” It looks like it’s saying, “The fire is hotter than everything,” but that’s the logical/literal translation, as opposed to a more accurate translation of what we are told it means in Klingon. … Not that it makes TOO much difference. charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.
On Feb 13, 2021, at 3:25 AM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin@gmail.com <mailto:de.vid.jonpin@gmail.com>> wrote:
TL;DR: You've shown that in other known canon instances of the comparative (except for {Qam[taH]vIS...}), the context in front applies to the entire comparative. Your own analysis of your interpretation of the proverb {reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS}, however, differs from your analysis of the other sentences, and actually applies {latlh qabDaq} only to the first half. (The only way the fire on someone else's face could be being compared to things not on that face is if {Hoch} is outside the scope of {latlh qabDaq}.) You're holding two mutually incompatible beliefs. Your explanation of the grammar of the other sentences differs from your explanation of this one, and so a reasonable conclusion is that this sentence is an exception to the others.
TL;CR (Too Long; Can’t Resend). The list rejected my reply because adding my short messaget to your long one exceeded the technical limit for a message sent to the list. So, you can look at earlier messages in the thread to find what I was responding to.
On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 02:09, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
You’ve missed my point. Analysis of a Replacement Proverb is probably futile because it may very well be gibberish that lost its meaning thousands of years ago. We can process the words, shoving them through the algorithm of translation and not actually translate the meaning into anything… meaningful.
I was trying to come up with something meaningful. My bad.
I retract my earlier analysis, since I was leaning in toward something meaningful instead of leaning in toward something literal.
It could very well mean, “On another person’s face [the fire is hottest.” And we might not really understand what that means, being perhaps a reference to a story long ago forgotten.
Thank you for recognising that your analysis of the proverb is inconsistent with your explanation of the grammar of the superlative. But I think you're retracting the wrong thing. I actually think you were right to analyse the meaning of the proverb. The problem with accepting that it means "on another person's face: the fire is hottest", is that this doesn't seem to match the translation of the proverb into English which we've been given: "The fire is always hotter on someone else's face". The English translation strongly suggests a comparison to someone else not on that face. (I'd have expected the other meaning to be translated as "The fire is always the hottest thing on someone else's face".)
In English, when an atheist hears someone sneeze, they might very well say, “Bless you,” out of habit/courtesy or “Ga-Zoon-Height”, even if they don’t know German. This might be like that.
Note that we’re not really told that {X Q law’ X Hoch puS} means X is "Q-er than everything.” We’re told that it means “X is Q-est.” It may look like a comparative, but it’s actually a superlative. It’s not really “The fire is hotter than everything.” It’s “The fire is hottest.” It looks like it’s saying, “The fire is hotter than everything,” but that’s the logical/literal translation, as opposed to a more accurate translation of what we are told it means in Klingon.
As I quoted earlier (from TKD section 6.6): "The idea of something being more or greater than something else (comparative) is expressed by means of a construction which can be represented by the following formula: A Q {law'} B Q {puS}... To express the superlative, that something is the most or the greatest of all, the noun {Hoch} 'all' is used in the B position". It certainly looks to me like we *are* being told, pretty explicitly, that "A Q {law'} {Hoch} B {puS"} means exactly "A is Q-er than everything", not just "A is Q-est". The word "superlative" is even glossed as "greatest of all", not just "greatest", and its formula is stated as just the comparative with {Hoch} in the B position. I don't see how it could be read otherwise. -- De'vID
We’ll just have to disagree. You are rejecting my point simply because you don’t like the conclusion. You are determined to press your case fixating on the MEANING of a Replacement Proverb, which we cannot understand because it’s an ancient proverb fossilized and repeated until nobody knows what it means, but they know when to say it, like responding to a surprising revelation in English with, “How about that!”, which uses a combination of words that make no sense together whatsoever, but we all know “what it means” because we’ve witnessed so many people utter it under similar circumstances. So, here’s your new assignment: Explain what “How about that!” means in English, breaking down the grammar and explaining the choice of each word in relation to the meaning of the sentence. When you can do that, I will be eagerly reading your insightful deconstruction of Klingon Replacement Proverbs. charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.
On Feb 16, 2021, at 3:38 AM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 02:09, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com <mailto:willmartin2@mac.com>> wrote: You’ve missed my point. Analysis of a Replacement Proverb is probably futile because it may very well be gibberish that lost its meaning thousands of years ago. We can process the words, shoving them through the algorithm of translation and not actually translate the meaning into anything… meaningful.
I was trying to come up with something meaningful. My bad.
I retract my earlier analysis, since I was leaning in toward something meaningful instead of leaning in toward something literal.
It could very well mean, “On another person’s face [the fire is hottest.” And we might not really understand what that means, being perhaps a reference to a story long ago forgotten.
Thank you for recognising that your analysis of the proverb is inconsistent with your explanation of the grammar of the superlative. But I think you're retracting the wrong thing.
I actually think you were right to analyse the meaning of the proverb. The problem with accepting that it means "on another person's face: the fire is hottest", is that this doesn't seem to match the translation of the proverb into English which we've been given: "The fire is always hotter on someone else's face". The English translation strongly suggests a comparison to someone else not on that face. (I'd have expected the other meaning to be translated as "The fire is always the hottest thing on someone else's face".)
In English, when an atheist hears someone sneeze, they might very well say, “Bless you,” out of habit/courtesy or “Ga-Zoon-Height”, even if they don’t know German. This might be like that.
Note that we’re not really told that {X Q law’ X Hoch puS} means X is "Q-er than everything.” We’re told that it means “X is Q-est.” It may look like a comparative, but it’s actually a superlative. It’s not really “The fire is hotter than everything.” It’s “The fire is hottest.” It looks like it’s saying, “The fire is hotter than everything,” but that’s the logical/literal translation, as opposed to a more accurate translation of what we are told it means in Klingon.
As I quoted earlier (from TKD section 6.6): "The idea of something being more or greater than something else (comparative) is expressed by means of a construction which can be represented by the following formula: A Q {law'} B Q {puS}... To express the superlative, that something is the most or the greatest of all, the noun {Hoch} 'all' is used in the B position".
It certainly looks to me like we *are* being told, pretty explicitly, that "A Q {law'} {Hoch} B {puS"} means exactly "A is Q-er than everything", not just "A is Q-est". The word "superlative" is even glossed as "greatest of all", not just "greatest", and its formula is stated as just the comparative with {Hoch} in the B position. I don't see how it could be read otherwise.
-- De'vID _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
On 2/16/2021 9:52 AM, Will Martin wrote:
We’ll just have to disagree.
You are rejecting my point simply because you don’t like the conclusion. You are determined to press your case fixating on the MEANING of a Replacement Proverb, which we cannot understand because it’s an ancient proverb fossilized and repeated until nobody knows what it means, but they know when to say it, like responding to a surprising revelation in English with, “How about that!”, which uses a combination of words that make no sense together whatsoever, but we all know “what it means” because we’ve witnessed so many people utter it under similar circumstances.
So, here’s your new assignment:
Explain what “How about that!” means in English, breaking down the grammar and explaining the choice of each word in relation to the meaning of the sentence.
When you can do that, I will be eagerly reading your insightful deconstruction of Klingon Replacement Proverbs.
I think you're missing his point. Whether or not the Klingon proverb is a fossilized expression, the fact is that we do have a translation of it as if it were a sentence constructed from modern grammar. *reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS* is translated /The fire is always hotter on someone else's face./ Whatever the true meaning, structure, and origin of the Klingon, it was translatable. Whether that translation is an accurate interpretation of the Klingon is another question. But the point is that some meaning, somewhere, was taken out of it and translated into an English sentence. You gave /How about that!/ as an example of an untranslatable English expression. This is something different than the above. If we accept your claim of untranslatability as true (and I don't, because the Klingon expression *toH!* seems to get quite close), then it is inapplicable to this discussion of a translated superlative. (I have read that /how about that/ comes from the more general /how about [blank]?/, which is an alternative of /what about that,/ which in turn comes from an archaic /what say you about [blank]?/ So the grammar here is unmysterious. The /how/ is asking your reaction:/how/ do you react? The /about that/ is specifying what you are supposed to react to. The expression is used rhetorically: I express my surprise as the answer to my own question. /How about that/ may be a fixed expression with a fixed meaning, but that meaning is not completely lost in archaic grammar.) I think you're both assuming too much. You're assuming the expression cannot be analyzed in the normal way. De'vID is assuming that the English translation accurately reflects the meaning of the Klingon proverb. I don't think either position is clearly supportable. The Klingon sentence is odd, the English translation is odd, and no Klingon has explained it further. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 16:18, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
I think you're both assuming too much. You're assuming the expression cannot be analyzed in the normal way. De'vID is assuming that the English translation accurately reflects the meaning of the Klingon proverb. I don't think either position is clearly supportable. The Klingon sentence is odd, the English translation is odd, and no Klingon has explained it further.
I'll readily admit that I don't know what the English translation actually means. But I think *some* interpretation of the English translation has to accurately reflect the meaning of the Klingon proverb (assuming Dr. Okrand didn't completely mess up here). There's no reason to believe that the *grammar* of Replacement Proverbs is any different than normal sentences, is there? (Contrast this with toasts, for which we're told explicitly that they follow different grammatical rules.) -- De'vID
On 2/16/2021 10:39 AM, De'vID wrote:
On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 16:18, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name <mailto:sustel@trimboli.name>> wrote:
I think you're both assuming too much. You're assuming the expression cannot be analyzed in the normal way. De'vID is assuming that the English translation accurately reflects the meaning of the Klingon proverb. I don't think either position is clearly supportable. The Klingon sentence is odd, the English translation is odd, and no Klingon has explained it further.
I'll readily admit that I don't know what the English translation actually means. But I think *some* interpretation of the English translation has to accurately reflect the meaning of the Klingon proverb (assuming Dr. Okrand didn't completely mess up here).
There's no reason to believe that the *grammar* of Replacement Proverbs is any different than normal sentences, is there? (Contrast this with toasts, for which we're told explicitly that they follow different grammatical rules.)
I see no reason why the grammar of replacement proverbs would be any different than normal sentences. I'm not the one arguing that. I'm just not assuming that the English translation is necessarily all that close to the meaning of the Klingon. Okrand often translates loosely, especially on the two language tapes. I think some examination of sticky sentences like this is warranted, but we should not rely too heavily on the English translation to tell us exactly what's happening when we encounter strange grammar. Especially when the grammar comes from the language tapes, which are riddled with errors. In the real world, this may just have been a bad English-to-Klingon translation. Sometimes it's enough to say, "Hmm, isn't that interesting?" and move on. I think this is one of those times. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
I think that SuStel has stated my position more clearly than I have. My point is that if a Klingon Replacement Proverb is a poor candidate to base an argument for an exceptional case of interpreting how a Klingon comparative works. We have examples of the “scope” of stuff preceding a Klingon comparative encompassing the entire comparative. We have one case of two of these contexts preceding the two halves of a Klingon comparative, where the “scope” of each context is the half of the comparative that it precedes. Then we have this one example, which is somewhat cryptic where one is tempted to imagine that the “scope” of the context only applies to the first half of the comparative. That’s a really weak argument for the idea that it’s generally okay to provide context exclusively for the first half of a comparative and not provide any contrasting context for the second half. It may be the case that this is true, but it very much falls short of providing justification for broad generalization. At the very best, it could be interpreted as a poorly stated comparative that could have been easily improved by adding some kind of context-providing stuff before the second half of the comparative to make it clear that the previous context doesn’t apply to the second half, but even this is a stretch because it assumes an accurate translation of a Replacement Proverb that we don’t really understand all that well. I don’t think we should look at that specific example and mimic it a lot, assuring ourselves that “See? This is how Okrand does it, so it must be perfectly fine to do it this way,” especially when it would be remarkably clearer if we didn’t, and the difference is so slight. Maybe Okrand will make this clearer someday, but as they say in Rohan, “This is not that day." charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.
On Feb 16, 2021, at 11:08 AM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
On 2/16/2021 10:39 AM, De'vID wrote:
On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 16:18, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name <mailto:sustel@trimboli.name>> wrote: I think you're both assuming too much. You're assuming the expression cannot be analyzed in the normal way. De'vID is assuming that the English translation accurately reflects the meaning of the Klingon proverb. I don't think either position is clearly supportable. The Klingon sentence is odd, the English translation is odd, and no Klingon has explained it further.
I'll readily admit that I don't know what the English translation actually means. But I think *some* interpretation of the English translation has to accurately reflect the meaning of the Klingon proverb (assuming Dr. Okrand didn't completely mess up here).
There's no reason to believe that the *grammar* of Replacement Proverbs is any different than normal sentences, is there? (Contrast this with toasts, for which we're told explicitly that they follow different grammatical rules.) I see no reason why the grammar of replacement proverbs would be any different than normal sentences. I'm not the one arguing that. I'm just not assuming that the English translation is necessarily all that close to the meaning of the Klingon.
Okrand often translates loosely, especially on the two language tapes. I think some examination of sticky sentences like this is warranted, but we should not rely too heavily on the English translation to tell us exactly what's happening when we encounter strange grammar. Especially when the grammar comes from the language tapes, which are riddled with errors. In the real world, this may just have been a bad English-to-Klingon translation.
Sometimes it's enough to say, "Hmm, isn't that interesting?" and move on. I think this is one of those times.
-- 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
On 2/16/2021 12:11 PM, Will Martin wrote:
Maybe Okrand will make this clearer someday, but as they say in Rohan, “This is not that day."
chaq Peter Jackson RohanDaq mu'tlheghvam jatlhlu', 'ach 'oH qonpu'be' J.R.R. Tolkien. mangghomvaD SoQ jatlhbe' Aragorn, Mordor lojmItDaq Harghlu'pa'. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 15:52, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
You are rejecting my point simply because you don’t like the conclusion.
No, I'm trying to get you to understand how your point is simply irrelevant to the discussion.
You are determined to press your case fixating on the MEANING of a Replacement Proverb, which we cannot understand because it’s an ancient proverb fossilized and repeated until nobody knows what it means, but they know when to say it, like responding to a surprising revelation in English with, “How about that!”, which uses a combination of words that make no sense together whatsoever, but we all know “what it means” because we’ve witnessed so many people utter it under similar circumstances.
Let's use your analogy: <out of habit/courtesy or “Ga-Zoon-Height”, even if they don’t know German. This might be like that.> Let's say that we don't know German, but we're told that "Ga-Zoon-Height" means "to your health". We might ask, "How does Ga-Zoon-Height" mean "to your health"? "Does Height mean health in German?", etc. Given a sentence and its translation between English and another language, we can ask: "how does this sentence have this translation?" It does not matter the original reason why German-speakers say the word "Gesundheit" when someone sneezes. Imagine that {reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS} came up in a regular conversation, and wasn't being used as a replacement proverb. We're told its translation is "The fire is always hotter on someone else's face." Why does it mean that? That's a question that can be asked, independently of the fact that that sentence happens to be a replacement proverb. If you're uninterested in the grammar of the sentence, that's one thing. But the fact that a sentence is a Replacement Proverb doesn't make its *grammar* impervious to analysis. (Its *meaning* may be lost to time, but that's a different thing.)
Explain what “How about that!” means in English, breaking down the grammar and explaining the choice of each word in relation to the meaning of the sentence.
This isn't an analogous situation at all. -- De'vID
reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj law' Hoch tuj puS We know what it “means” by fiat. We know what it “says” by analysis of its grammar. They’re not quite the same thing. Some are trying to reconcile the discrepancy by twisting the grammatical analysis to match a particular interpretation of the given meaning. Some are trying to reinterpret the meaning to match the analyzed grammar. Neither strategy is wholly satisfactory, and I believe any such reconciliation is unnecessary. My stand is simple: Taking the law'/puS formula as a given, it literally says “Always, on another’s face, fire is hottest of all.” Based on the authority of Power Klingon, it is literally translated as “The fire is always hotter on someone else’s face.” But its *practical* meaning is just as a ritualistic phrase intended to acknowledge a dishonorable goof by the speaker and invoke the cultural custom of dismissing it. It really has nothing to do with faces or fires, and I personally see no productive reason to focus grammatical attention on it. Consider someone speaking French, telling her friend “Elle cherche une belle-mère.” It literally means “She is looking for a mother-in-law.” However, a French-English phrasebook of the 1950s might explain it as “Her father loves her better than her mother.” A student of the French language might be puzzled by how wanting a mother-in-law can be interpreted as having an extra-loving father. In truth, both phrases are merely code for “Her slip is showing.” Perhaps something similar is going on here. Or, as I believe is likely, it’s just a bad translation. Either way, I don’t think the literal words are worth worrying this much about. -- ghunchu'wI'
participants (4)
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Alan Anderson -
De'vID -
SuStel -
Will Martin