tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 02 21:22:35 1994

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Rovers and more...

>From: "Matt Gomes" <[email protected]>
>Date: 3 Feb 1994 06:52:07 -0800

>qajatlhneS:

>  Since I'm well on my way to making a Mac parser, I came across a
>question (okay, many questions)..

>1)  Can you have multiple rovers in your verb?  Some of the suffixes
>(like -Ha', I think), come right after the verb, but how about -be'?
>Can I say something like... vIHoHbe'qangbe'?  I am not willing to not
>kill him?  Is this sort of thing possible?

Well, we have a canonical example in TKD of "pIHoHqu'vIpbe'" and two other
purmutations of the same suffixes, so it's safe to say that rovers can
appear more than once per verb.  Now, can the *same* rover appear more than
once, as in your example?  I don't see why not.

>2)  The other question was something I saw in TKD.  The sentence I was
>worried about was: yaS vIHoH...  I killed the officer.  Wouldn't it be
>better to say: yaS bIHoH?  Why would I want to say vI?  That sounds
>more like: I killed him the officer.

"bIHoH"??  That's certainly wrong.  That means "you kill (no subject)"  I
presume you meant "jIHoH".  I think you're not fully understanding how
conjugations work.  Consider English, where our verbs change form depending
on the subject.  So when you hear "goes" you know the subject *has* to be
third-person singular, or when you hear "am" the subject *must* be
first-person singular.  Because of that, you could (if you wanted) really
leave off the subject entirely in some cases.  Most dialects of English
don't, for whatever reasons, but you sometimes hear, in "clipped" settings,
such talk.  "Lost connection.  Am attempting to reestablish".  Something
like that.  OK, so "am" implies "I".  Does that mean that if I *do* say "I"
then I shouldn't use "am", but rather "be" or "is"?  Of course not.  "Am"
is the form of the verb that you use when the subject is first-person
singular, whether the subject is stated or not.

In Klingon "vI-" is the way you conjugate the verb when the subject is
first-person singular and the object is third-person singular or plural.
It just is.  If "I" am doing the killing and the thing being killed is not
me or the person or persons addressed, I have to use "vI-".  So if I'm
killing an officer (who's in the third person), I must say "yaS vIHoH".  As
an added bonus, if I chance to say "vIHoH" with no stated object, you know
I must mean that I'm killing someone or ones in the third person ("I kill
him/her/it/them").  So I can leave off the object, like I could leave off
the "I" in "I am", and you'll work it out from context.  But I still need
the "vI-", no matter whether the subject is stated or implicit.
(Incidentally, leaving off pronouns when the person is implied in the
conjugation is very common in some languages; don't assume it's unusual
because English doesn't do it much.)

~mark

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