tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 03 23:07:10 1998

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Re: KLBC: rep

---David Trimboli <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> From: Robyn Stewart <[email protected]>
> 
> >As you can see from above, Klingons use the 24 hour clock, and speak
> >in terms of hours.  We don't know for sure how to say "twenty to" or
> >"quarter of" of "five past."  Kloingons having adopted our method of
> >telling time after the dial clock became somewhat obsolete, they
> >probably just say
> >
> >?wa'maH loS rep wejmaH
> >
> >or
> >
> >?wa'maH loS rep wejmaH tup
> >
> >Those are purely guesses.
> 
> I don't understand those guesses.  Are you losing 
> the {vatlh} somewhere?

Well, yeah.  Why would you say {vatlh} when there is no "00"?

14h00 - "two in the afternoon" or "fourteen [hundred] hours" 
14h30 - "two-thirty in the afternoon" "fourteen-thirty" or "fourteen
hours thirty" or "fourteen thirty hours"

Is this a gallicism?  chay' bojatlh tlhIH?

> We're told that Klingons have borrowed the 24-hour day from Terrans,
> including the way it's said.  "Fifteen hundred hours," or 3 PM, is
{wa'maH
> vagh vatlh rep}, literally, "fifteen" plus "hundred" plus "hours."
> 
> If the Klingons borrowed this system fully (and I don't see why they
> wouldn't), then something like "Fifteen hundred thirty hours" would
end up
> like {wa'maH vagh vatlh wejmaH rep}.  It's a direct borrowing.  It
doesn't
> have much grammatical meaning in Klingon, except in its borrowed
roots.
> 
> This is one of the very, very rare cases when you should first think
of how
> it's said in English, and then translate it word-for-word into
Klingon.

That's what I did.

You actually say "fifteen hundred thirty hours"?  What does the
hundred mean?  To me it means "plus two zeroes." There aren't any
actual hundreds involved, eh?  I just asked a non French-speaking
native English speaker who has been in the [Canadian] military to read
15h00 and 15h30.  He said "fifteen hundred hours" and "fifteen thirty
hours."  

Web searches to see if we are anomalous revealed "military time" used
in two stories and a news summary.

"On July twenty-first, at fifteen-thirty hours, the accused and
another soldier, one senior grade Lieutenant Mukatsu Tojiro, were
off-duty 
near the motor pool." (http://ronin.anime-manga.net/plum.txt)

“Initial announcement to take place at sixteen 
thirty hours aboard ship: Full crew meeting on recreation deck at
one-seven-one-five hundred hours.” 
(http://aviary.share.net/~alara/startrek/incomplete/InARushToGrowUp.p0-1)
- Interesting: uses (to me) very odd form for 17:15.

The cult's everyday language is unusual for
a mystical order - one group schedule is laden with words like
"operation," "sixteen-thirty hours," and "travel orders."
(http://www.mk.net/~mcf/alexfmsf.htm)

"I finish work at nineteen thirty hours and quickly change my clothes
then run to where I've hidden the knife."
(http://firehorse.com/outlaws/hanz.html)

No results for "fifteen hundred thirty hours" "sixteen hundred thirty
hours" and so on to nineteen.

So yeah, I dropped the {vatlh}.  I was copying my English usage, which
is slightly different from SuStel's and the common usage on the web. 
We'll get Okrand to ask Maltz, and be done with it. :)





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