tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jun 01 17:57:30 1997
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RE: KLBC: <*Hovleng: tlhIngan> audiotape
- From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: KLBC: <*Hovleng: tlhIngan> audiotape
- Date: Mon, 2 Jun 97 00:50:12 UT
jatlh tlha'noD:
> *Hovleng: tlhIngan <audiotape> vIje'pu'. vI'Ijpu'.
> I bought the Star Trek: Klingon audiotape. I listened to it.
In The Klingon Way, we get the proverb "Listen to the voice of your blood,"
which is {'IwlIj ghogh yIQoy}. Okrand specifically uses {Qoy} instead of
{'Ij}. He says something about "hearing" involving more concentration than
"listening," (which seems a bit backward), but it may be that he was simply
using {Qoy} because it is definitely transitive. You can "hear something,"
but you cannot "listen something." I have no proof that {'Ij} is not also
transitive, except for this proverb and TKD's gloss of "listen," an
intransitive word in English. If it were meant to be transitive, I think he
would have written it as "listen to."
So, say {vIQoypu'} "I have listened to it."
Oh, you used those {-pu'} suffixes because you have completed these actions,
right? You're not mistaking them for past tense, are you?
> tlhIngan Hol jatlh tlhInganpu'. tlhIngan Hol jatlhchu'be'!
> The Klingons (on the tape) speak <tlhIngan Hol>. They don't speak it
> clearly/perfectly!
For both of these instances of {jatlh}, we have a plural third-person subject
{tlhInganpu'} and a singular third-person subject {tlhIngan Hol}. The prefix
chart on TKD page 33 tells us that the appropriate prefix here is {lu-}.
tlhIngan Hol lujatlh tlhInganpu'. tlhIngan Hol jatlhchu'be'!
> munuQ! lInuQ'a'?
> They bother me. Do they bother you-all?
>
> Is using a question mark with interrogative suffixes redundant?
Not at all. Remember, the text we write is not what Klingons actually use.
Who knows if they even *have* punctuation. But when you're reading it with
ASCII letters, you need the clarification of punctuation. You cannot hear the
intonation through text.
Besides, I could say,
Is using a question mark for this sentence redundant
You could look at it and figure out that it *must* be a question by the
wording, but it's tough to read it without that question mark.
> And, by the way, is the <tlhIngan Hol> on the CD-ROM (upon which the tape is
> based) as bad as the language on the tape?
The Immersion Studies (the story about Pok) has some so-so Klingon. The
Language Lab, however, has excellent Klingon (Robert O'Reilly makes a few
mistakes, but overall he does a great job).
--
SuStel
Beginners' Grammarian
Stardate 97418.3