tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 25 01:30:39 1994

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     Someone requested help with {'e'}. This is a very useful pronoun in
Klingon. Don't confuse it with the suffix. It is its own word.

     Basically a verb is a complete sentence in Klingon. Nouns make the
implied subject and object more specific, so you can think of nouns as verb
modifiers. A noun can function three ways in a Klingon sentence. It can be an
object. It can be a subject. It can give the verb a spacial or temporal
setting. That's about it for the function of nouns in a Klingon sentence.

     A sentence in Klingon can have only one main verb. Secondary verbs can
be added by suffixes that make a verb dependent upon the main verb. For
example, if you add {-pa'} to a verb, you make it dependent upon another
verb. If I say, {qaqIppa' yIjatlh} [Speak before I hit you!] you should
recognize that the important thing in this sentence is {yIjatlh}. It is a
complete sentence. {qaqIppa'} is not a complete sentence. It merely serves to
add meaning to {yIjatlh}.

     So how do you say something like "I know you are keeping something
secret,"? The problem is that {bIpeghtaH} [You are keeping something a
secret] is a complete sentence unto itself. How do you connect "I know..." to
this sentence?

     Well, you don't. TKD 6.2.5 explains that in Klingon, often that which
would be in one English sentence must be expressed in more than one Klingon
sentence. Given that, you might recast your sentence into two sentences: "You
are keeping something secret. I know that."

     Well, {'e'} functions like the English word "that" in this example. It
is the object of the second sentence, and it represents the entirety of the
first sentence. Since TKD does not give any evidence that punctuation exists
in Klingon, we can mush these two Klingon sentences together as if they were
one sentence. You might think of {'e'} as a peculiar kind of conjunction to
connect two sentences.

     Our sentence(s) then become(s):

                    bIpeghtaH 'e' vISov

     You have to remember that there is a special relationship between the
two sentences here. {bIpeghtaH} is represented by {'e'} and is the OBJECT of
{vISov}. We call this the Sentence As Object construction (named by the
heading in TKD). THERE IS NO SENTENCE AS SUBJECT CONSTRUCTION. By that, I
mean that you cannot say:

                    bIpeghtaH 'e' QaQ

     You might want to translate this as "It is good that you are keeping a
secret." Sorry. There is no clearcut way to say that in Klingon. The
construction only works when the first sentence is the OBJECT of the second
sentence. There are various odd ways around this, which are each strange
enough, if not controversial enough that it is usually a better idea to
rethink the thought you are trying to express. In this case, for example, I'd
say:

                    bIpeghtaH 'e' vIparHa'

     "I like that you are keeping a secret." Now, the first sentence is again
the object of the second sentence.

     Some verbs are so frequently used in this Sentence As Object
construction that there is no need to express the pronoun {'e'} at all. Verbs
of saying, for example, fit this category. "I say that I like you", for
example would be:

               qaparHa' vIjatlh

     The verb {neH} does the same thing. If I hand you a piece of paper and
say, "I want you to keep this a secret," it comes out:

                    Dochvam DapeghtaH vIneH

     More literally, this means, "I want that you continuously keep this
thing secret." This is an awkward wording, but the sense of continuity that
{-taH} adds is difficult to bring across to English. It is kind of a bonus
point; a message that Klingon carries better than English does, similar to
the sense of intentionality that {-ta'} carries that is difficult to express
in English without awkward wording. In this example, you can assume that I
added {-taH} because I do not want you to ever STOP keeping this thing a
secret. In fact, it might be downright advisable for the benefit of your
longevity that you continue to keep this thing a secret...

     I hope this satisfies the earlier request.

charghwI'

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