tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jul 13 09:57:03 1996
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KLBC: Re: "Kahless" book: an addendum
- From: Krenath <[email protected]>
- Subject: KLBC: Re: "Kahless" book: an addendum
- Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 12:57:00 -0400
I've added the KLBC: prefix to the subject of this post because I don't
think the content will be of much interest to the hard-core tlhIngan
speakers and linguists. I'm hoping it will be of use to the beginners like
myself.
>
>Page 82 mentions {en'tach} leaves, so {en'tech} is a sort of plant or weed or
>bush or tree.
New vocabulary is always exciting, but the word {en'tach} or {en'tech}
would, for tlhIngan, be a nonsense word.
The closest spelling that would work in tlhIngan would be {'entech} or
{'entach}.
For those who aren't too familiar with tlhIngan words, I include the
following. Please share it with your friends. And be they scriptwriters
for Deep Space Nine, print it out, roll it up, and beat them with it until
they consent to memorize it.
English speakers interprets the ' as no sound whatsoever. Merely a
placeholder for missing letters or a marker for possessive as opposed to
plural so they know what to do with a stray "s". English speakers seems to
feel that the apostrophe is somehow exotic, possibly hinting as secret
letters and word meanings, and they seem to love to add them liberally to
words they want to give an 'alien' mystique.
Klingon does most certainly pronounce the '. Is it a "glottal stop", an
abrupt ceasing of the vowel sound before it, or starting of the vowel sound
following it. The glottal stop is a consonant, not a vowel, and cannot be
wedged between two other consonants.
Additionally, {en'tech} or {en'tach} starts with a vowel. No tlhIngan word
does this. Words which tlhInga borrows (reclaims?) from other languages
which originally started with a vowel are invariably provided with a glottal
stop as the first letter so a warrior may properly pronounce them.
In fact, simple Klingon words, those not composed of several individual
words, invariably follow the pattern Consonant-Vowel-Consonant... With
occasional words continuing by several more vowels and consonants, and the
rare word ending with a vowel rather than a consonant. The only times you
see tlhIngan consonants back-to-back is in the joining of simple words to
make compound words, the addition of noun or verb suffixes or prefixes, and
when Terrans mistake such tlhIngan consonants as "tlh", "ch", "ng", and "gh"
as more than one consonant and imply that throwing handfuls of consonants
into a word is just dandy.
For the beginner, having some idea where simple words are likely to be
joined to make compound words is definiely a blessing. For example:
{qatlho'}, to a beginner, may appear to be either {qatlh} + {o'} or {qa} +
{tlho'}. Rather than bother searching for {o'} in the dictionary and see
how it applies to the word {qatlh} (why?), the beginner can decide to
discard the first combination and find that the word is {qa-} (I V you) +
{tlho'} (thank).
(Oh! gotta go. HolQeD vol. 5, Issue 2 just arrived!)
,-------+-----. Eric Koske, Register Data Systems, Register Communications.
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