tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 19 12:37:04 1998
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RE: Coffee is ready
- From: Robyn Stewart <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: Coffee is ready
- Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 12:36:36 -0700 (PDT)
---Wendy Fillmore <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > If the coffee is finished perking, you might try "it has been
prepared."
> >
> > -- ghunchu'wI'
>
> I've been lurking for quite some time now, so this is my first post.
>
> How would you say "It has been prepared." or "The coffee has been >
prepared."
Welcome qalara. You've chosen a knotty question to delurk on. You
see, in Klingon you can't just say that something is "ready," you have
to say what it is ready to do. Saying that something is ready to have
something done to it needs some rewording. That's why we're going
around it with "has been prepared."
"prepare" referring to food is /vut/. The subject is indeterminate,
that is, you're not mentioning who prepared it, merely that it has
been prepared. So you use the /-lu'/ verb suffix. And the point of
the sentence is that the preparation of the coffee is complete, so you
use the perfective. The deliberateness of the preparation of the
coffee doesn't seem relevant here, so I'd use /-pu'/. All together,
using OVS sentence order, you get:
qa'vIn vutlu'pu'
==
Qov - Beginners' Grammarian
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