tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 28 03:39:07 1993
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This 'n' That
- From: Captain Krankor <[email protected]>
- Subject: This 'n' That
- Date: Mon, 28 Jun 93 05:56:44 -0400
Ok, I've gotten somewhat behind, so here are some quick comments on a
bunch of things that have been floating around on the list.
First off, punctuation:
As far as I am concerned, punctuation is largely a pIqaD issue. As long as
we are using romanized writing, we might as well treat ourselves to romanized
(or, at least, English) punctuation. There is certainly nothing prohibiting
this, and it definitely can help clearify meaning, and just generally make
the parses easier on people, so it is a definite win for the list. This is
not, however, in any way to imply that in true Klingon pIqaD there would be
English punctuation or even anything similar or equivalent. Or maybe there
is. We don't know. But for the purposes of this ascii-bound list, standard
punctuation is completely kosher, including question marks. Yes, you don't
really need them, but it *is* nice to mark the end of a sentence, and it would
be confusing to end a question with a period. The same comments apply to
line and paragraph layout, etc.
This, of course, does not mean you *have* to use such punctuation. But you
are certainly permitted to, and I recommend it.
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> ghorgh tlhIngan jIH 'e' vIneHchoH
> when Klingon I that I-come-to-want-it
> When did I begin to want to be a Klingon?
A couple of problems here. First, neH doesn't take 'e'. (p.66 at
the very bottom). Second, the ghorgh is not really in the right
place (see "From The Grammarian's Desk", HolQeD 1.2). The sentence
should be:
tlhIngan jIH ghorgh vIneHchoH
> Qaw''egh yuQvam 'e' Dalegh'a' 'e' jatlhpu' HoD Kirk
> "Do you see that this planet is destroying itself?" said
> Captain Kirk
Same problem: jatlh doesn't take 'e' either.
>> 'ej HIja' DurIH'a' 'e' jatlhpu' la' Qugh
>>
>> and Yes it-energizes-you said Commander Krug
> Almost. The 'a' makes DurIH'a' a question. It was as close to "Yes,
>invigorating, isn't it?" as I could manage. Everything else was perfectly
>translated. I didn't list that just to keep this brief.
Again, no 'e'. I like the use of rIH to try to get at
"invigorating", but I think I'd do it ever so slightly differently
and drop the Du-. To me, the english implies that it's invigorating
in general, not to the person being spoken to, so I'd use the
no-object form, which in this case is the 0 prefix. In fact, even
this isn't what I *really* want; what we need is a way to do
indefinite *object*, (as opposed to using -lu' for indefinite
*subject*), so we could say "it energizes one". Also, the "isn't
it" is probably better done with qar'a' (6.4, p.179). So I would
get;
'ej HIja', rIH qar'a' jatlhpu' la' Qugh
Unhappily, it appears I never received the original of this post; it
looks pretty interesting.
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Krenath and Michael Everson gave good responses to all the German (I assume)
that's been flying by (in one form or another), so I'll let that go.
Also marqem and mark handled the "Klingon language spoken here" very well,
so that also needs no further comment. mark also fielded Krenath's question
about 'oHbe' just fine.
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Let's see, what else? Randall Holmes asked about putting suffixes on
'e'. This has come up before; alak, at present, the answer would seem
to be "no". 'e' is a chuvmey, not a noun, and therefore, lacking explicit
say-so, example, or at least *some* kind of evidence, we can't assume it
can take suffixes. Usually this comes up with regard to trying to say
'e'mo'. I agree this seems reasonable, and if I had to guess, I'd bet
that Okrand would/will ok it, but at this time, nope, can't do it.
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Ok, I think I just caught up on 40 messages or so. Did I miss anything?
--Krankor