Newsgroups: startrek.klingon
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 00:15:47 -0500
Subject: Re: DIrmey pagh DIrDu'
Ken Traft wrote ...
The use of
location. Phrases like "In God We Trust" or "I believe in magic" or the
"from/of" types of meanings have not been easy to do in Klingon.
In English, the preposition "in" is sometimes locative (that is, referring
to location) in meaning (e.g., "in the house," "on the table") but
sometimes not (as in the examples cited above, "trust in God," "believe in
magic"). In fact, in English, "in" frequently doesn't have a literally
locative sense. We use it all over the place: "in debt," "work in
television," "in preparing this report," "speaking in Klingon," and so on.
Likewise, in addition to the locative uses of the English preposition
"from" ("run from the burning house," "traveled from Paris"), there are
non-locative uses ("know right from wrong," "stop me from eating"). The
story's the same for other English prepositions (for example, locative "on
the table," non-locative "go on with your story"; locative "under the
table," non-locative "under discussion").
In Klingon, however, the noun suffixes -Daq (the general locative) and
-vo' "from" express only notions related to space ("to a place," "in a
place," "from a place," and so on). They are thus not the same as English
prepositions, which have a wider range of usage.
Modal title1
...