Re: Is the Sev Trek 2 translation ready? (and catagories ofindirect objects) Saul Epstein Thu, 25 Jun 1998 22:14:57 -0500 Quotes from: Rob Zook Date: Thursday, June 25, 1998 4:27 PM > English: > Gaudy: Beta, can I ask you a personal question? > Beta: Of course, Gaudy. > Gaudy: Are you IBM compatible? > > Vulcan: > Gaudi: th'nidroijia goifa jidokhti beta'a > Beta: s'nidroima gaudi'a > Gaudi: qa s'izgezu ibumusko > >Does anyone see anything else wrong with this translation? As you suggested in your last post on the subject, should take - in the first sentence, as the direct (or Accusative) object of . However, I'm not sure the word needs to be there at all. In English (and other IE languages) we use "to ask" to refer to inquiries AND requests, but this is hardly necessary. If specifically refers to the act of asking a question (as opposed to asking a favor, for which there could be an unrelated word) we could leave out a direct object in this case, and the sentence could mean something like "Can I inquire..." Also, could you go a bit into what - and do? I understand your objection to using - as a casual conditional (though I think it would not be a problem in the Ambiguous Mode). But does the Formal Mode make any kind of provisions for this sort of thing? Would an Ek-structure be applicable to something like: Gaudy: yarapu ci'goifa th'nidroi'icek, yarabu pujia'ek P-labels (invasively I-inquire)-if, B-labels P-is-permitted-if (P="I ask an invasive question;" B=permitted(P); If B then P.) Beta: bu'a' B. Gaudy: az pu'a: qa s'izgezu ibumusko Therefore P: Are you IBM-compatible? ..,out of idle curiosity, mostly... > Also, Saul had proposed the suffix -sko for the "with" kind of > instrumental object. Since the general indirect objects we have already, > can have much more specific meanings. I had been wondering can the > various kind of objects be divided into well defined catagories? Probably. My inclination regarding "with" is similar to that regarding "ask:" I see pieces of the languages with which we're most familiar committing some lumpings-together that are more glaringly arbitrary than others (sometimes with unfortunate implications). Drawing lines between categories in different but still sensible places seems an easy way to keep Vulcan from being too much like Terran languages, particularly Indo-European ones. This is why I didn't want a "together with" suffix to look like the "by means of" suffix: I'd like the former to be a different kind of "indirect" object altogether, perhaps an associative case, with no relation to the instrumental. > If so, we might want to make a small set of indirect object suffixes, > and use them for informal vulcan. Then add some kind of modifier to > the suffix for a catagory of indirect objects and make it more > specific. [snip] > Knowing the indirect object catagory might be enough if the sentence > makes the meaning fairly obvious. While the specific indirect object > would make it easy to speak very precisely without obfustication or > overcomplication. > > Comments? I think this would work very well, though I might prefer that the specifiers be set off as separate words, for the sake of various kinds of clarity. I just hope I'm getting across that I'd like, with the unrelated -ti and -sko, to make it impossible for a Vulcan to say, "I walk with Surak," and for another to interpret this to mean that the speaker uses Surak as a cane or a walking stick. -- from Saul Epstein locus*planetkc,com www,planetkc,com/locus "Surak ow'phaper the's'hi the's'tca'; the's'phadjar the's'hi suraketca'." -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at