tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 16 04:30:32 1994

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KLBC- RE>Beginners Unite!

>From: "Matt Gomes" <[email protected]>
>Date: 16 Feb 1994 11:00:13 -0800


>   Reply to:   KLBC: RE>Beginners Unite!

>~mark, being the helpful person he is, corrects me:

>> De'wI' vIghaj.
>> De'wI' Daghaj'a'?

>toH!  jIyaj.  cholugh.  "verb prefixes" Qatlh.

I'm still not perfect on what this "grammarian" business is, but I think
part of its point is for just this reason: to keep novices from being
drowned in corrections repeated over and over to the same mistake.  That's
actually probably most of its point.  And in any case, Matt was adressing
me, you might as well let me answer, grammarian or no.

Now.  Marnen missed some points you may want to consider.  "lugh" means "to
be correct".  If you mean "You are correct", then "bIlugh" has the right
prefix.  The prefix you used, "cho-" has the meaning of "you" as subject
and "me" as object.  Perhaps you meant "You correct me," in which case it
was the *right* prefix, but the wrong verb.,.  "To correct", as we use it
in English, means "to make correct", that is, to cause someone/something to
be correct.  The way to express this kind of causation in Klingon  once you
have the simple verb (like in this case) is the suffix "-moH".  So for
"you correct me", "cholughmoH" would work.

"Qatlh" is a verb meaning "to be difficult".  Now remember, it's a verb.
As such, it should precede its subject, like all good little verbs do in
Klingon.  So to say "verb prefixes are hard", you need to put the "Qatlh"
at the beginning: "Qatlh <verb prefixes>".  Now, some verbs (just which is
a matter of some debate) can also come after the nouns that you'd expect to
be like their subjects, in order to act as adjectives.  You *could* say
"<verb prefixes> Qatlh", but it means "difficult verb prefixes", which is a
sentence fragment, not a whole sentence.  Also, as Marnen points out, we
*do* have words for "verb" and "prefix", so you can say "wot moHaqmey"
(which is sorta like "verb's prefixes", the way Klingon nouns work when
they're used one after the other).  You could also leave off the "-mey",
since plural-marking is optional, but that's a more advanced class... :)

>Qapla'!

>-mat



~mark

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