Archive of Okrandian Canon
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From: Marc Okrand <mokrand@erols.com>
Newsgroups: startrek.klingon
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 00:15:47 -0500
Subject: Re: DIrmey pagh DIrDu'
Ken Traft wrote ...
>The use of <-vo'> and <-Daq> have indicated as being used only to specify
>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.