tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jan 26 18:10:47 1996

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: KLBC> Mixed Nits



David Wood writes:
>What words are there, for the known Klingon cultural art forms, if any (the
>words, I mean, not the art forms).

There aren't many that I know of.
There's {bom}, a noun meaning song/poem and a verb meaning sing/chant.
There's {QoQ}, a noun meaning music/musical sound.
To "compose" music is the same thing as {qon} "record".
{tonSaw'} is klingon fighting.
And don't forget {mu'qaD veS}, "curse warfare".

>mu'meyqoqvammo' vuDmeyraj nuq? peyuDHa' 'ach <vIparHa'> DIjatlh.

Hmm... {nuq} *does* act as a pronoun, so maybe it can be a verb,
but I'd prefer {...nuq 'oH vuDmeyraj'e'}, or {...vuDmeyraj yIja'}.
{DIjatlh} confuses me.  "Be honest, but we speak them 'I like it.'"
I think you wanted a different prefix here, but I'm not sure what
it would be.

>botwI'   = thing which prohibits = lock
>chaw'wI' = think which allows    = key

Bleah.  First off, {chaw'} is already a perfectly good noun which
means "permit" (similar to "license"), so {chaw'wI'} is unnecessary.
However, these are what ~mark calls "hindsight-words"; they might
make sense if you already know what they mean.  In this case, though,
they are waaaay too general to have the meanings you want them to.

You'll have to be quite a bit more specific if you want someone to
understand what you mean without first knowing what you are talking
about.  You can often rephrase what you want to say in order to give
the same meaning but avoid the "problem" word.  Why do you want to
use the words "lock" and "key"?  Maybe there's a different way to
express your ideas that doesn't require these specific nouns.

-- ghunchu'wI'               batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj




Back to archive top level