tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Mar 20 00:44:50 2006

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Re: Cute/Adorable KLBC (again)

QeS 'utlh ([email protected]) 

ghItlhpu' Shane MiQogh, ja':
>I never thought of takin' that approach. And you're right,
>slightly held would be more of a hug and slight touch would
>be more of a poke...

Or a brush by: {loQ be'nalDaj Quch Hot loD} "the man stroked his wife's 
forehead".

>or slight push with the finger would
>also be a poke...

Indeed. The finger verbs are actually rather useful, and the exact meaning 
they have is very much dependent upon context. {ghIchDaq SIq'egh}, for 
instance, means "he picks his nose with his index finger". I have absolutely 
no problem with ghunchu'wI''s suggestion of {SIq} as "he pokes him with his 
index finger".

>I guess it is a little more flexable than given... Just takin' a bit
>to get used to, cause klingon itself has a really really small
>vocabulary list compared to even french or german or russian..

Absolutely true. Klingon's vocabulary *is* fairly small, particularly 
compared with the almost embarrassing vocabulary of English. This is also 
the case for other agglutinative languages. Nahuatl (Aztec) and Ubykh both 
have relatively low numbers of roots; Ubykh has between 3,000 and 4,000, and 
I think Nahuatl has a few more than that. The reason why is that in such 
languages, complex ideas are very often built up from series of simple 
roots. This is absolutely true of Klingon; "deaf", for instance, would most 
likely be translated as {QoylaHbe'bogh} "who is not able to hear". Much of 
being able to speak good Klingon (or other similar languages, for that 
matter) has to do with being able to decompose complex ideas like this into 
simpler concepts that the Klingon lexicon can handle, and this will come 
with practice. Don't fret; it won't happen overnight, but it will happen. 
{{:)

Savan,

QeS 'utlh
tlhIngan Hol yejHaD pabpo' / Grammarian of the Klingon Language Institute


not nItoj Hemey ngo' juppu' ngo' je
(Old roads and old friends will never deceive you)
     - Ubykh Hol vIttlhegh

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