tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Feb 23 13:06:16 1998

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Re: tlhutlh

Engelbert <[email protected]> (QomwI=A5) writes:
>I=A5m new to the list...

nuv chu' pIlajbej.  Newcomers are always welcome.  If you're afraid of
asking stupid questions, see the FAQ (there's a pointer to it from the
KLI home page at /).  But the standard advice about 
stupid questions applies here:  the only really stupid question is the
one you don't ask. :-)

A minor point:  your email software seems to be putting in an unusual 
character in place of the simple quote mark.  Your note is full of =A5
things, making it hard for some people to read it.

I'm also an ex-Beginners' Grammarian, so I'll jump in with my comments
too.  (Qov seems to be deeply involved with other important tasks at
present.  This happens from time to time.)

>A few days ago, I went out for a drink with a friend of mine. The thing
>ended up with a hangover the next day, so I decided: "Too much drinking
>isn=A5t good for me." I tried to translate this idea in Klingon and came
>upon {jIHvad QaQbe=A5 tlhutlh}. 

You've run into one of the small "beginners' traps" in learning to
communicate using Klingon.  Like any language, there are phrases that
Klingon says well, and there are phrases that it fails to say well. 
Your phrase is one of those that don't fit Klingon grammar.  Someone 
with much more experience in the language doesn't run into such traps 
very often, because quite often they compose the thought using Klingon
grammar to begin with and don't have to make the step of translating 
from English (or whatever language the thought is originally expressed
in).

charghwI' is a master at capturing the thought behind the words in a 
phrase like this and re-expressing it in a way that is much easier to 
state in Klingon.  In most cases, you'll find that getting specific 
helps.  What do you really mean by "isn't good for me"?  I'd have said
something like "If I have gotten very drunk, I become ill."  And maybe
I'd toss in an invective for good measure. ;-)

>Not satisfactory however, since it doesn=A5=t
>express the notion "too much", 

There isn't a simple way in Klingon to express "too much".  There is 
a relevant example in TKD's appendix: {tujqu'choH QuQ} "The engine is
overheating."  One of the audiotapes says something like {HoSghajqu'}
"too potent" when explaining why Terrans shouldn't drink Romulan Ale.
The {-qu'} suffix is often appropriate where English would use "too", 
but it's not quite the same meaning.

>and beside of that, I am using a verb
>{tlhutlh} as a subject, and as far as I know, a subject is always a
>noun. I wonder if it it possible to "nounify" a verb in Klingon as it is
>in English.

Yes, subjects (and objects) are always nouns.  And yes, it's possible 
to turn a verb into a noun in Klingon.  The addendum of TKD describes 
the verb suffix {-ghach} and how it can make nouns out of verbs, but
it's usually not a good idea to make too much use of that particular
grammatical tool.  {-ghach} serves a purpose, but it's too easy for it
to be misused.  In this particular case, {tlhutlhqu'ghach} is close to
what you said; it means something like "extremeness of drinking".  But
as charghwI' has already pointed out, you aren't really talking about 
ingesting fluid so much as you are talking about taking in enough
alcohol to become drunk.

>Then I tried {jIHvad QaQbe=A5 jItlhutlhqu=A5} to express the idea "much"
>using the rover -qu=A5. I am still not sure about the grammatical
>correctness, however. Should I use the type 9 suffix -bogh for instance,
>and where do I put it?

{-bogh} is completely inappropriate here.  It's used to create a 
clause that describes or specifies a noun: {wewbogh nagh} "the rock
which glows" or {'un vIchaghpu'bogh} "the pot which I have dropped."
Nothing in your idea requires a relative clause like this.

You're falling prey to another beginners' trap here.  If your sentence
doesn't come out saying what you want it to, the temptation is to make
small changes to it and nudge it closer to what you want.  But often 
the basic framework of the sentence is sufficiently far from "correct"
that you wind up with a horrible mess of patches.  It is usually worth
the effort to scrap the sentence and start fresh.

Instead of taking your sentence and trying to see what Klingon grammar
can be matched to it, try taking Klingon grammar and trying to see how
it can express your idea.  It's hard at first, until you have seen and
can recognize a large body of relevant examples, but it's probably the
only way to avoid the kind of pitfalls that one often encounters when 
translating between languages.

-- ghunchu'wI'

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