tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 17 09:35:21 1994
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Hints for beginners
- From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
- Subject: Hints for beginners
- Date: Thu, 17 Feb 94 17:44:05 EST
Hearing the woes of beginners unable to find words you see on this list
in the dictionary, I thought it might help to offer a couple pointers.
First, if the word has only one syllable, just look it up in the main
TKD word list. If you don't find it there, please check the appendix. If you
don't find it there, and if the word MIGHT be a curse word or a proper name,
check pages 58 and 178, where words appear that do not appear in the regular
word lists. Eventually, you should read the entire grammar sections of TKD,
and you will run into other little things like {SSS}, which is another
backfit where Okrand was trying to explain why the actor in ST1 was hissing
while he held his hand up before ordering the gunner to fire another torpedo.
If the word has at least two syllables, try to figure out if the word is
a verb. You need to figure out if it has a prefix. Only verbs have prefixes.
You can waste a lot of time looking up words that begin with {Da-} or {vI-}
only to discover that the verb stem begins AFTER the prefix. Remember to scan
the tables from pages 162-168. You will be using these a LOT. FOR THE REST OF
YOUR LIFE. Get used to it.
Verbs are quickly recognizable if they have verb suffixes, yes?
Even then, you can be screwed by words like the verb in {'o'Daq 'oy'
DataH}, which can either mean "You endure a pain in the behind," or "He
continues to behave like a pain in the behind." HEY LAWRENCE! CONSIDER THAT
MY CONTEST ENTRY! {Da} can either be a prefix or a verb and {taH} can either
be a verb or a suffix.
Once you figure out what the word stem is, you can look it up and piece
together the specific meaning through the affixes. It is very important that
you read the grammar parts of the dictionary over and over until they become
familiar. A lot of the discussion on this list is in the form of us old
fogies suddenly coming to some new understanding of a passage we have read
for a year or two and now realize means something different than we thought.
There are a very few words that you will not find because TKD is
imperfect and incomplete. By "imperfect", I mean that there are a couple
Klingon words that are in the English to Klingon section, but not listed in
the Klingon to English section or vise versa, like {quq} means "Happen
simultaneously", but don't look for it next to "happen" on the English side.
"whine" = {vIng}, "wing" = {tel}, "be weird" = taQ and "yeoman" = {ne'} are
all missing from the English to Klingon side.
{bol} = "drool" is missing from the Klingon to English side. These are
not commonly used words, so they are rarely a problem, but if they ARE used,
well, you just have to pick these things up and "annotate" your dictionary.
By "incomplete", I mean that Okrand has used a few new words in his two
audio tapes that are not in the dictionary. Not many, but a few. There also
are two VERY small lists of additional words approved by Okrand, both of
which were published in HolQeD, the newsletter to which you should be
subscribing if you have any REAL interest in Klingon language.
I hope this helps. For your own writing, I recommend strongly that you
try to develop skill with verbs first. A well formed verb with all its
appropriate affixes is often a sentence unto itself. Use nouns when you need
to be more specific than the prefix's implied pronouns can handle. Next, do
the same for nouns. And chuvmey? Well... they are chuvmey, after all.
When a noun that you want does not exist, pause to reconsider the
sentence you are writing. It is okay to nominalize a verb to get the noun you
want, but it is even better if you can rethink the sentence into a form that
uses verbs as verbs and nouns as nouns, instead of turning verbs into nouns
as we so often do in English. Consider the difference between, "Give me your
answer," and "Answer me." The latter is a solid Klingon-like sentence. The
former is held together with devices not unlike duct tape and bailing twine.
This is why I believe that for beginners, it is FAR more important to
try to express your own thoughts through Klingon than to try to translate
something written in English by someone else. This gives you more options for
restating the thought than figuring how to say "One nation, under God,
indivisible for liberty and justice for all," or whatever. A lot of strange
things have been written in English. Don't assume that for every English
sentence there is a single equivalent sentence in Klingon. That's not how
languages work.
Few compliments have pleased me more than to hear that my Klingon
writings are often exemplary. I only hope that I can continue to earn such
comments.
Hmm. But then a TRUE warrior knows when he has finished talking, right?
DaH jIjatlhta'.
charghwI'