tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 05 10:42:56 1998
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Re: KLBC: rep
On Fri, 3 Jul 1998, Robyn Stewart wrote:
>---David Trimboli <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> 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"
>
>>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.
Qov is correct: "hundred" is only used on the hour to refer to the two zeros
when the time is written. Then you say, "fifteen oh one," "fifteen oh two,"
fifteen ten," "fifteen thirty," "fifteen forty five," "fifteen fifty nine,"
then "sixteen hundred." SuStel has obviously never served in the military.
>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."
After college I spent five years as an officer in the US Navy, and the only
people I heard say "fifteen hundred thirty hours" were new recruits (before
they'd learned to speak correctly) and civilians (including a few actors) who
mistakenly think it sounds more military. These are the same people who
confuse boats and ships, walls and bulkheads, doors and hatches, chiefs and
warrant officers, and so on.
>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. :)
I wonder what the original Klingon system for telling time was? I would
imagine it's still used on occasions, particularly in rituals.
Voragh