tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Apr 27 09:58:24 1995

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Re: Adverbial Concepts

ghItlh William H. Martin:

> According to Silauren, Half-Elven:
> > 
> > 
> > On Wed, 26 Apr 1995, William H. Martin wrote:
> > 
> > > The general rule is that in Klingon, verbs roots are always
> > > monosyllabic. Nouns and chuvmey may become polysyllabic, but
> > > not verbs. I know of no exceptions.
> > 
> > hrm... i remember from my Klingon class that there was one or two 
> > exceptions to this rule, but offhand i don't know what they are.  
> > glancing through a list of verbs from class notes, i see the verb 
> > {Qapla'} (v, win)...
> 
> The verb for "win" is {Qap}. The noun for "success" is
> {Qapla'}. The only polysyllabic verbs in TKD are monosyllabic
> verb stems with standard verb suffixes. These entries exist
> apparently because the specific meanings of these specific verbs
> with these suffixes may be slightly different than one might
> otherwise expect. It is good to see how some of these suffixes
> are used in these examples.
> 
> Still, I am relatively certain that there are no polysyllabic
> verb stems in Klingon, and I've typed the entire dictionary
> into my word processor once, and then copied (a word at a time)
> all the listings from it into my data base program, so my
> familiarity with the vocabulary is pretty good. There are
> others here who dwarf this effort. I know ~mark has manually
> entered the entire manuscript several times, since he keeps
> buying new PDAs and manually reentering the dictionary. I fully
> expect to see him at qep'a' with the entire dictionary entered
> into his watch. [That's a joke, okay?]
> 
> Anyway, I highly recommend this practice of rewriting the
> dictionary. Doing so makes you notice things like the
> monosyllabic nature of verbs, the discrepancies between the
> English/Klingon and Klingon/English sides of the dictionary and
> it results in a single word list with all the words on it.

I checked my copy of the dictionary in MDBase 4.00, and I could
not find any polysyllabic verbs.

> > > charghwI'
> > 
> > --naQ'avwI'
> 
> charghwI'
> 

-- toDbaj
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