tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 28 19:18:04 1996

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Re: KLBC:I need some ideas.

Chris Lipscombe writes:
>"After lunch I will invade western Europe"

Klingon doesn't explicitly speak of tenses (past, present, future), so
let's ignore the "future" implications of the word "will" for now.  It
will be taken care of by other context.

"After lunch" is a prepositional phrase, which Klingon doesn't have.
We'll have to reword this to use some other grammatical tool.  To
express the idea "after" we can use the verb suffixes {-pu'} and {-DI'}
together.  Try adding a verb on which these suffixes can be placed:
"When I have eaten lunch, I will invade...."

For "western Europe", you tried {poS *europe*} "left's Europe".  Put
it the other way around to make {*Europe* poS} "Europe's left", which
is probably about as good as you're going to get.

So we've got {megh vISoppu'DI' *Europe* poS vIyot}.
"As soon as I have eaten lunch, I will invade Europe's left."
This is how I would interpret it in the morning, before lunch.
In the afternoon, after lunch, it would more likely mean
"as soon as I had eaten lunch, I invaded Europe's left."

-- ghunchu'wI'               batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj

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