tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 21 22:30:57 1996

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Re: KLBC: sources

Ahah!  My first vict^H^H^H^Hcustomer {{;)

I really hope that you read my "Message for beginners" I posted last night;
it tells you who I am, and why I am replying to your post.  If not, please
say so, and I will email you a private copy.

I'll be correcting your grammar, and answering your questions both.  Some of
what I say will be in Klingon; most will be in English.  Please don't be
offended if I go into more detail than you require; not being able to read
your mind, I don't know what you understand and what you don't, so I will
try to explain things as clearly as I can.  Also, other beginners may not
understand as much as you do, and these replys are for *everyone*.


At 09:50 PM 8/20/96 -0700, Jeffrey Stimac wrote:
>qaSuj'a'
>Am I bothering you?


...and this is a very *nice* first sentence!  Short, simple... and only one
possible error, depending on meaning...

If you are adressing just one other person, (like just me), your sentence is
perfectly correct.  If you are speaking to the entire list as a whole, then
the "you" in your English translation is actually plural.  Unfortunately,
English has lost the distinction (as far as I know) between "you (just one
person being adressed)" and "you (multple people being addressed)".  About
the closest thing I can think of is the Southern "you all" or "y'all", which
I have picked up the habit of using in my everyday speech, just so I know
when to use the plural suffixes, as opposed to the non-plural.  {{:)

Basically, if you are adressing everone on the list, instead of one specific
"you", then you want to use the Sa- prefix (I-y'all):

        SaSuj'a'?

Verb prefixes are on page 33 of your Klingon Dictionary (imperatives are on
the following page, 34).

The only other thing I noticed is that you English said "bother" while the
klingon strnslates to "disturb".  This is a good example of what I mean by
"don't give me theliteral translation--give me what you were TRYING to say".
Please notice that there is a verb "to bother" <nuQ>, which you could have
used to yield the the translation you gave.

Now, to answer your question:


ghobe'!
not muSuj taghwI'pu'.
tlhIngan Hol DaghItlhqangmo', batlhna' Dachavbej.
choquvmoHneS je!
tugh yIghItlhqa'!


>lajmo' HalmeyHey'a' tlhInganvaD Hol?
>What are the official sources for the Klingon language?


Owie.  The first one was really nice... {{:)

First, you have no primary verb in your sentence.  You have <lajmo'>, which
means "because it accepts"... which is an incomplete thought (eother that,
or it means "because of acceptance", but then you don't have even have a
verb at all).  an incomplete though is as grammatically incorrect in Klingon
as it is in English.  In your English sentence, your verb is "are"... which
is a form of "to be".  If you check out pages 67-68 of your KD, you will
find a grammatical device which behaves like "to be" in English.  If you
look at the examples on page 68, you will see this structure follows the form:

        NOUN1 <pronoun> NOUN2'e'

which would translate to:  "NOUN2 is/are NOUN1".

Now, if we can take your Enlish sentence, and put it into this format, then
we can use this structure to translate your sentence.  In fact, your
sentence is *already* in this format:  "what (NOUN2) are the official
sources?"  (we will get to the "for the Klingon language" part in a
minute--one smal bite at a time!).  All we need to do now is find the
Klingon words for "what" and "official sources".  "What" translates to
<nuq>.  It looks like you used ?HalmeyHey'a'? for "official sources".  This
is an interesting way to translate it, if you are intending to use -'s', the
augmentive noun suffix.  Since -'a' is also a verb suffix, I am not sure if
you tacked it on here to make this a question.  If you did, it was an error,
as -'a' only turns VERBS into questions.  When -'a' is used on a noun, it
makes it much more than what it was.  A house is <juH>.  A _great_ house
(mansion) is <juH'a'>.  A <Hal> is a source.  A <Hal'a'> is a
source-of-sources... a GREAT source.  to be perfectly hones, though, I would
not understand it to mean "official source" (although others might).  I
would want to use -na' ("definite") on it... but then you could not use -Hey
("apparent").  I'm not entirely certain why you have -Hey on there in the
first place, actually (unless you are making commentary on the various
debates we have on here about wht is "canon" and what is not... {{;) )

The -Hey suffix gives the "apparenly (but I could be wrong)" connotation to
a noun.  <DujHey>:  "the apparent ship"  (I am pretty sure it's a ship, but
I could be wrong).  The -na' suffix means the opposite:  it gives a meaning
of "definite" (or sometimes "true") to the noun to which it is attached.
<Dujna'>  "A definite ship"  (a true ship, not a sesonr shadow.  I have no
doubt that it is a ship).

Since I don't want to hold up further discussion on this because I am not
sure precisiely what you intended, I will go under the assumption that you
were using -'a' to convey the meaning of "official" and -Hey as a commentary
on it...

If this is truely the case, then your suffix-order was a bit wrong.  The
-'a' suffix is a Type 1, and must be the first thing after the noun.  the
other two suffixes are in the right order.  That gives us <Hal'a'meyHey> for
"official sources".  Now, the only thing we need is the pronoun linking
"what" and "official sources".  Pronouns can be found on page 51.  You need
one that matches both the subject an object (since they ar really the same
thing, so they will have the same pronoun anyway).  So, which pronoun would
you use to replace "official sources" in an English sentence?  "They".
Since "what" can be ambiguous as far as number, it can match "they" as well
("The offical sources for the Klingon language, what are they?" is another
way to think of this).  There are *two* words for "they"!  One is for beings
capable of speech, and one is for anything not.  Since "official sources"
cannot speak, we want <bIH>.

Now we put the pieces into the structure:

        NOUN1  <pronoun>  NOUN2'e'
        Hal'a'meyHey bIH nuq'e'
        "What are the official sources" (using what I think is your
translation                 for "official"

Please note two things:

        1.  In this structure, you MUST ue the type 5 noun suffix on NOUN2
(the subject); that is one of the rules of the structure.

        2.  Use of the question word <nuq> *automatically* makes this a
question.  You don't need to use the verb suffix -'a' to make a question out
of a sentence with <nuq> in it.  In fact, it is INCORRECT to do so.


Now, that last part... remember I said we would get to the part about "for
the Klingon language" later?  Well, we are there. {{:)

It looks to me that you were trying to use the type 5 noun suffix -vaD to
mean "for" in this sense.  Unfortuantely, the word "for" has many, many
meanings in English, whereas -vaD is a bit more limited.  -vaD generally
only menas "The noun this suffix is attached to is the recipient of the
verb" or "for the benefit of".  In fact, you would do better to think of
-vaD in it's "intended for" meaning.  The best examples of this are on page
180 of your KD (it's inthe appendix) under "Indirect Objects".

When you enter a situation like this, think to youself:  "what do I mean
here?  Can I say this another way?"  In this case, yes you can... you can
alter your sentence to:  "What are the official sources OF the Klingon
Language" or "What are the Klingon Language's Official sources?"

A possessive!  That's another structure that is very clearly defined.. the
noun-noun construction on pages 30-31!  In Klingon, if you put one noun
after another, then the two words can be translated as "the first noun's
second noun"... which is exactly what we have here:  the first noun is
"Klingon language", which we know to be <tlhIngan Hol> and the second noun
is "official sources", which we have rendered as <Hal'a'meyHey>.  So,
"official sources for the Klingon Language" could be said:  <tlhIngan Hol
Hal'a'meyHey>... which would go in the sentence right where "official
sources" is now:

        tlhIngan Hol Hal'a'meyHey bIH nuq'e'?
        "What are teh official sources of the Klingon Language?"

*** DEBATE ALERT ***
The use of the noun-noun construction has been debated back and forth on the
list a loooong time.  some might question how I used the noun-noun
construction here; I didn't use it to endorse one particular philosphy or
another, just to give you an alternat method of translating this phrase.


Actaully, as I said several screens up, I would not use -'a'/-Hey.  I would
either use -na' to indicate "offical" <Halmeyna'> or I would use a relative
clause meaning "which everyon accepts"  <Halmey'e' lajbogh Hoch>


To answer you question:

Well, that's antoher hotly debated topic. :)  I think everyone can agree
that the Klingon Dictinary is a source, as are the the two audio-cassette
tapes by Simon and Schuster(spelling?):  "Conversational Klingon and Power
Klingon", plus the Klingon CD (which I have heard about, but don't have...
yet).  Marc Okran, who create the Klingon Dictionary, was involved with the
creation of all of these.  There are a number of other sources which are NOT
wholly agreed upon, such as the various Star Trek novels--most notably those
written by john Ford, who had many Klingon words which (I think he...
everyone else certianly does) he refers to as Klingonaase.

If I remember right, I think I saw a posting from Mark Shoulson, the list
Grammarian, saying that for convention, we use only Okrand-bless.., er,
words/grammar form Marc Okrand, but I will let Mark adress that issue (if he
bothered to even READ this novel...)


I hope this rather lengthy response helps you...

>-- 
>Jeff Stimac
>HoD qarghan


I think I remember seeing something saying that there is a canon example
that ranks should come *after* the name... i.e., qarghan HoD.  

Don't feel bad; I often call myself HoD trI'Qal still. {{:/


>yIlop! wa'leS chaq maHegh!
>Translated from Klingon:  Celebrate!  Tomorrow we may die!

Wow!  That was absolutely perfect!  Of course, knowing my luch, that is
right out of _The_Klingon_Way_... {{:/


--trI'Qal (my name doesn't mean anything, so don't look it up. {{:) )


Translations:
------------

No!
Beginners never bother me.
Because you are willing to write Klingon, you have Honour.
You also honour me, honoured one!
Write again soon!

---
HoD trI'Qal, tlhIngan wo' Duj lIy So' ra'wI'
Captain T'rkal, Commander IKV Hidden Comet
Klingon speaker and net junkie!
HaghtaHbogh tlhIngan yIvoqQo'!  toH... qatlh HaghtaH Qanqor HoD???
monlI'bogh tlhInganbe' yIvoqQo'!  SoHvaD monlI' trI'Qal...

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