It always amazes me how you can write with such confidence about things
you know nothing about. Where do you have any support whatsoever for
pretty much anything you say below? Do you know the first (or seventh)
thing about Klingon?
Klingon absolutely has a word for "beautiful", and a canonical example
speaks of "beautiful foreheads," not beautiful axioms. It is true that
Klingon has no simple word for the verb "love", but it does have a noun
for "beloved", and derived verbs like "un-dislike" for "like".
It's Vulcans that are all about logic, not Klingons; are you sure you're
thinking of the right fiction?
~mark
Mark Shoulson, Assistant Director, Klingon Language Institute
On 03/03/2013 08:41 AM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
2013/3/3 Michael Everson <[email protected]>:
On 3 Mar 2013, at 12:06, john knightley <[email protected]> wrote:
When translating from one language to another there are always some words and
expressions for which there exists no exact equivalents.
The vocabulary related to fantasy, and magic things look very foreign
to Klingon's logical structure of thinking. You would need to
translate them as "not logical", "not concludable", "not asserted",
"missing axiom".
Even things like "beatutiful", being highly subjective, would have
little meaning because the only beautiful thing in Klingon's spirit is
the logic of things and the necessity : what is beautiful for them is
the reduced set of axioms, and the absence of contradictions. Matters
of opinions, and feath, are not beautiful for them, but order and
predictability is beautiful (even if there are admitted freedoms in
their world : randomness and chaos is then beautiful).
In their vocabulary, "I love you" makes no sense, they can just
understand "I need you". As they also "like" the order of things, they
like ceremonials, because they are enacted by past agreements (and an
agreement cannot be repudiated). This gives their sense of "honor".
The Alice's Wonderland would be extremely difficult to describe with
recognized words, except being part of what they just consider as
"randomness" and unpredictable. In this meaning they would not respect
what is common to humans, and may be a reson why they don't care at
all about humans and their spirituality or dreams. For them, humans
are just freely adjustable variables, and removing them has no special
impact, unless they need them for respecting their mutual pacts and
goals of action, and for preserving their own life (more exactly the
life of their community, supposed to be eternal by axiom).
