tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Sep 19 21:42:59 1994
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Re: KLBC: jItagh
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC: jItagh
- Date: Mon, 19 Sep 94 17:02:50 EDT
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "Craig Altenburg" at Sep 19, 94 10:37 am
According to Craig Altenburg:
>
> Craig [Qaygh] 'oH pongwIj'e'.
> ( or is that: jIhvaD Craig vIpong.)
> vighun.
> muDDujHom vIchenmoH 'ej muDDujHom vIpuvmoH.
Welcome! Unfortunately, one of the most difficult verbs to use
in Klingon is the one every beginner wants to use: {pong}. It
means "call, name", like "They call the wind Mariah."
Unfortunately, in that example, the verb "call" has two equal
objects. The technical term for that is "apposition". The two
nouns, "wind" and "Mariah" are in fact different words for the
same thing. We don't have clear grammatical guidelines for how
to do that in Klingon yet.
My own choice is to say, {charghwI' mupong tlhInganpu'},
"Klingons call me charghwI'." Others dodge the whole question
and use {pong} as a noun: {charghwI' 'oH pongwIj'e'}, "My name
is charghwI'." Your first attempt works as an example of the
dodge. Your second attempt means, "For my benefit, I call
Craig."
Your next sentence worked fine. I even figured out muDDujHom
without an explanation. When you are not sure about a word like
that, it helps readers (especially beginners) if you begin your
message with a small vocabulary list of special words.
Especially for beginners, if they don't find it in TKD as is,
it is not a bad idea to list it before your message. People
like to list such words AFTER their message, but for beginners,
often they give up before they get that far, primarily because
they got tired of wrestling with words that were not in TKD...
> Well, at this is my first post here, and my first public attempt
> at tlhIngan Hol, I probably pharsed that badly, but I hope you
> get the idea. BTW, muDDujHom means model aircraft. I could not
> find a word for "model" so the diminutive was pressed into service.
No problem. You did fine.
> Actually I'm more into model and high-power rocketry but couldn't
> find a word for rocket and didn't think I could come up with
> something even close.
Yep. That's a difficult one. Rockets are somewhat obsolete by
the Trek time setting, and while Duj may be equated to other
vehicles for carrying people, like airplanes, we don't really
have a word for "tube that sprays gas out the back without
sucking air in the front".
Consider that Klingons may never have developed rockets. Maybe
they went straight to impulse engines. We don't know. At any
rate, they didn't seem to have rockets when TKD was written, so
you might consider a rocket to be a device idiomatic to humans
and just keep it in English with quotation marks around it,
sort of like the French "le weekend".
> While I'm at the keyboard, I guess I'll ask a few of general
> questions:
>
> * Is there an official souce of vocabulary other than TKD? TKD
> is great but there are a lot of concept that it doesn't cover.
> (e.g. rocket).
The best supplement is HolQeD, a quarterly publication of the
Klingon Language Institute. Most people on this list already
subscribe. Back issues are available. Contact Dr. Lawrence
Schoen. You probably just read his post about the future
publication of Hamlet.
> * Is there an offical thlIngan calender?
No.
> * How is the (') pronounced at the beginning of a word?
As it turns out, English speakers ALWAYS pronounce a glottal
stop as the beginning of a bare vowel. Other languages
sometimes don't, as in the Hawian "aloha", which English
speakers apparently cannot pronounce correctly because we
cannot even hear the subtle difference between a vowel that
begins with a glottal stop vs. one that doesn't. This is our
version of the cliche' oriental inability to differentiate
between an "l" and an "r". In other words, if Klingon had open
vowels at the beginning of a word, we could not pronounce it
right. Klingnos merely spell what they say, while we don't.
> * How are to (')s in a row pronounced. (e.g qama''e')
You might ask how two "t"s are pronounced in "splatter". Like
any other consonant, when it is doubled, it is usually
pronounced only once, though extreme elocutionists may choose
to explicitly enunciate each one. I know a human who pronounces
every "t" twice. She says "water" so it sounds like "watt ter".
Yes. Any word with a "t" in it sounds like two words when she
is done with it.
> Qapla'.
>
'ej SoHvaD Qapla' je.
charghwI'