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[Tlhingan-hol] Long and short sentences in English and Klingon

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh ([email protected]) 

Since the topic arose quite naturally on this list recently, I thought that it might be good to illustrate how, in English, remarkably long sentences are easily supported because of English’s use of “helper words” to give you local context for the grammar of each phrase within the sentence so that, while your attention may wander while parsing unusually long sentences, these nearby words give you the necessary clues to interpret the grammar while deriving meaning from a series of words that require so much time to read, to write, to speak, or to listen to that you requite these clues lest the totality of that single thought being expressed by the sentence rupture under the time-related weight of the peculiar expression created by the sentence’s author while constructing it.

Klingon, on the other hand, uses word position with a limited number of “slots”, and Type 5 noun suffixes or Type 9 verb suffixes to give you the grammatical function of each word. Basically, you have the beginning of a sentence where time stamps always go, adverbials always go, locatives always go, and phrases constructed around Type 9-suffixed verbs usually go (with a couple of exceptions), then you have the object noun (or the noun phrase marked by a {-bogh}-suffixed verb for a relative clause), then the main verb (and as in The Highlander, “There Can Be Only One”), then the subject noun (or the noun phrase marked by a {-bogh}-suffixed verb for a relative clause), and then maybe one of those exceptional verb phrases where the verb has a Type 9 suffix. Oh, and I guess you can count verb conjunctions that combine two sentences, if you really have to. That’s pretty much it in terms of places to put words to construct a Klingon sentence (except for comparison sentences, which have an even more limited word-position-defined grammatical layout completely unrelated to anything else in Klingon grammar). Klingon doesn’t give you the kind of near-each-word help you need to parse each sentence phrase in the sentence without a reference to the overall map of the word within the sentence, and there’s less redundancy of clues. Add that word order is so much less flexible in Klingon.

Most of the other suffixes in Klingon tune the meaning of the word, but do not affect its grammatical function in the sentence, resulting in a very few methods to indicate what a word is doing in a Klingon sentence, requiring that you break down longer English sentences while translating them into Klingon.

I’m sure there are exceptions to the basic layout of Klingon grammar here, like the extension of one sentence to include another in a Sentence As Object construction, or like a quotation, though arguably, Klingons may not consider either of these constructions to be single sentences, since we do not know anything about Klingon punctuation. The punctuation we use with our Romanized alphabet is really a phonetic notation of what Klingon sounds like, rather than a representation of how Klingon is written. For all we know, pIqaD uses a new line for each sentence or they may simply not notate any division between sentences, and there may be no equivalent of a period.

I just woke up and am not quite firing on all cylinders. A dream drove me to write this.

Just keep in mind that if you decide to translate this message into Klingon, be prepared to either mercilessly edit out a lot of detail, or break things down into smaller “complete thoughts” to define shorter sentences. The whole concept of a “complete thought” has remarkably vague and arbitrary boundaries in English, but in Klingon, the grammar has far less flexible boundaries, though to be fair to the language, the number of suffix classes for nouns, but especially for verbs, allows ridiculous length to be applied to single words far more than is common in English. Even German is challenged to come up with words long enough to compete with a Klingon verb with a complete or near-complete set of suffixes, and English definitely cannot compete in this area with German.

So, when translating from English to Klingon, ignore the original sentence length and break down the ideas conveyed in the English into chunks that fit within the Klingon grammatical structure. Also, consider that it is not in the cultural character of Klingons to ramble to the degree that English speakers are inclined, and so it is acceptable to carve away unnecessary detail to get to the nut of what the Klingon translation should be expressing.

In My Humble Opinion.

Have a nice day (which I wouldn’t be writing, if I were writing in Klingon)

lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
Door Repair Guy, Retired Honorably




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