tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 18 11:17:42 1996
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Re: KLBC: Check spelling
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I'm sending this back to the list, because I think it's worthwhile.
>Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 01:30:07 +0200
>From: Tremal-Naik <[email protected]>
>At 10.58 16/10/96 -0700, you wrote:
>
>>everything looks great except for the "jIjaH". The best fix for the prefix
>>on that is to omit the entire word.
>Thank for the suggestion but I've got some doubt.
>If I want to say:
>"I easly killed the insect" (sorry for my english :-)
>it's right "ghew vIngeD vIHoHta'"?
> ^^ ^^
>I think that vI in "ngeD" mean: me as subject, HoH as object
>and vI in "HoH" mean: me as subject, ghew as object.
Not quite. Klingon isn't English, and notice the sentence structure. The
English has the word "easily". That's an adverb. It modifies the action
of the killing. Klingon has adverbial forms, but there are only a small
number of them (a "closed class," so far as we know) and they aren't
regularly derived from verbs. You can use a subordinate clause
(e.g. "jIQeHtaHvIS jImej"/"I left while I was angry" for "I left
angrily."), but you have to pay attention to what you're saying.
"*ghew vIngeD" means "I am-easy the insect," as if "being easy" were an
action you could do to something else. You say you want to use "HoH" as
the object. I only see "HoH" there as a verb. You can use verbs as parts
of sentences and then use the sentence as an object, if you use the "'e'"
pronoun, but that won't help you here (you can't "be easy" the act of
your killing of a bug any more than you can "be easy" a bug. "ngeD"
doesn't take an object that I can understand.)
You have to recast this sort of thing; Klingon simply doesn't have many
simple adverbs. You're saying (a) I killed the bug, and (b) it was easy.
You can do something "ghew vIHoH. ngeD [Qu']." You can also start to get
clever and idiomatic and see how you like things like "ghew vIHoHchu'" or
"ghew vIHoH rIntaH" or "pItlh. ghew vIHoH." None of these really say what
you mean, but might carry the right implication in the right contexts (and
accompanied by the right gestures and facial expressions).
~mark
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