Re: Privacy and Translating Sev Trek 2 Rob Zook Fri, 19 Jun 1998 16:44:03 -0500 At 01:26 PM 6/19/98 -0500, Saul Epstein wrote: >Quotes from: Rob Zook < < >>Beta-'a qia gio >>Beta-[voc], [requesting permission] [privacy] >> >>qa th'-nidroi jidokh-ti >>? I -ask question-[instrumentive?] >> >>"Beta, may I ask a question that may broach your privacy?" > > >Unfortunately, this reads more like, "Do I ask?" than "May I ask?" The >ZC includes an infix for a permissive mood, but I doubt there's room >for it among the proposed revisions. Well, the suggested additudinals could work as infixes just as well. I had forgotten about the ZC permissive infix. Actually it looks like a suffix, like the imperative. 6,5 Action/State words have the following basic forms. 1. STEM; e,g. Kroy (stop) Ran (kill), Kapra (calculate) 2. IMPERARIVE; ,e,g. rankah (ran-kah) 'Kill!' PROHIBITIVE e,g. rIankah (see above) 3. PERMISIVE; e,g. Kroma (Kroy-ma) 'may stop' 4. VERB-NOUN; e,g. ranat (Ran-at) ' killing' >We might do well to pull the question out of the statement altogether, >and shoot for something like, "If permitted, I will ask an invasive >question." > >jia'ek inveisiv th'nidroi >permitted-if invasive I-question > >This might literally mean either "If permitted, I invasively ask," or >"If permitted, my question [is] invasive." Hmmm..,I feel really sure we should not use -ek as a conditional clause indicator. I think we could probably use the permissive suffix. We can give it the more specific sense of "x may do/be the action/state" while the prohibitive may work as the exact opposite "x may not do/be the action/state". So jia, could be the additudinal, which means "please permit", "if permitted", it's a request, but not exacly a question. So, a formalized request to violate another's privacy: th'nidroijia goifa jidokhti '<I ask a privacy question' where < means 'privacy', so a < (a 'privacy question') would mean a very specific thing, a question which the speaker suspects or knows the listener would regard the answer of which, as private. To which, a listener may reply < 'you may ask', or < 'you may not ask'. >>ih,bu,mu. qa s' -izgezu >>[IBM letter pronunciations] ? you-[compatable] >>"(are) you IBM compatable?" > >I'd suggest <, literally, "(Is it so, that) you >[are] compatible with IBM?" (Though I'd like at some point to split >the associative sense of "with" away from the instrumental sense.) Yes, that sounds a bit better. As far as spliting 'with' away from the instrumental sense, how about, < 'with', < 'using'? Guady: th'nidroijia goifa jidokhti beta'a Beta: s'nidroima guadi'a Guady: qa s'izgezu ibumute Now, that's how we could handle it in a privacy situation, but since neither are Vulcan maybe a more strict translation might be: Guady: th'nidroijia jidokhti beta'a Beta: ah'ah guadi'a Guady: qa s'izgezu ibumute Where ah'ah would be an intensively reduplicated 'affirmative' which could mean 'of course'. I think adding a -h to the "long" allophones matches the various TOS book vulcan transcriptions nicely. Also in our phone conversation, when the original spelling had a vowel+h, Marketa almost invariable gave it a different sound than the vowel without an h. Hmmm..,maybe that should be jidokh'hi, in both cases? Rob Z. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of another. -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_