tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 12 05:17:50 1996
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PK opening scene question
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <[email protected]>
- Subject: PK opening scene question
- Date: Mon, 12 Aug 96 08:17:18 EDT
WARNING! This post concerns the opening scene of the Power Klingon cassette,
including a mostly-complete transcription of that scene. If you have not
yet transcribed it yourself, you may want to skip the rest of the message,
so that you don't have anything but your ear to go by; it makes excellent
listening-comprehension practice.
Of course, it's been out for a long time, so this sort of spoiler warning
may be superfluous, but just in case... I mean, *I* just got around to
trying it. :)
Okay.
On to my question.
I finally felt that my Klingon skills were up to the task of
transcribing the opening scene from PK. And I seem to have been mostly
correct, but there is one word of which I can make neither heads nor
tails, and a couple about which I'm not sure.
Here's what I have:
tlhIngan: nuqneH.
tera'ngan: 'IH jaj, qar'a'? maja'chuqjaj?
tlhIngan: jISaHbe'.
tera'ngan: bISaHbe'? qatlh vIjatlh(1)? chaq SoHvo' vay' vIje' vIneH!
tlhIngan: tugh. Su'. bIje'be'chugh, vaj bIHegh. quvwIj DatIchpu',
tera'ngan. bIyIntaH 'e' ?????(2)
<disruptor fire>
tera'ngan: yIjotmoH!(3)
<more disruptor fire>
tera'ngan: <drawing phaser> Dochvetlh yItlhap!
<phaser fire>
<disruptor fire>
<scream as Terran is hit by disruptor>
1. Not at all sure about the prefix on {jatlh} here.
2. Sounds like <taQoQIpe'>; I would expect, given the apparent
sentence-as-object construction, a verbal prefix that takes an object, so
the {ta-} could be a {Da-} (but its closer to {da} in pronunciation);
similarly, the {-pe'} could be a {-be'} suffix, the {Q}s could both be
{q}s, and the vowels might be off (/u/ instead of /o/, for instance). Even
taking all of those variations account, I can find nothing that makes
sense. Help!
3. I may be misremembering this word; I don't have my notes or the tape
with me. {yIjotchoH} would make more sense, but I seem to
recall {-moH}, which doesn't make sense to me here without {-'egh}
in front of it. Just {yIjot} would also work, but is obviously not
what's on the tape.
Were the initial {maja'chuqjaj} not spoken by an obviously clueless Terran,
it would make me wonder about the previous discussion on the various meanings
of "may" in English. That looks suspiciously like a request for permission:
"May we talk?" rather than "May we talk!" in the sense of a wish. Although
I suppose the intent is similar in either case.
I felt that he pronunciation overall was pretty good, although some of the spacing was
odd, and the Terran's {tlh} in {yItlhap} was particularly bad.
Anyway, any help with the missing word would be appreciated; other comments
welcome.
-marqoS
--
Mark J. Reed |
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