tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 12 20:29:24 1996

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Re: tlhIngan_Hol *.wav



Daniel writes:
>This is my first time writing tlhIngan-Hol, if you flame me I'll have to
>regain my honor by SoH HoH!

Hi, Daniel.  Welcome to the list!  Don't take this response as a flame,
please; I'm just doing my job. :-)  Here's my boilerplate introduction:

I'm called ghunchu'wI', and I'm the list's current Beginners' Grammarian.
My job is specifically to help people who are beginning to learn to write
and/or speak tlhIngan Hol.

If you want feedback on what you have written, put KLBC (Klingon Language
Beginners' Conference) in the subject line of the message.  That tells me
that I should look at the message quickly.  I will be ready to assist you
with any questions you have, or to check your grammar, or simply to offer
my opinion on your writing.  The KLBC marker also indicates that the rest
of the people on the list ought not to jump in with their comments before
I have had a chance to give my response.

I do have a "real" job and a family besides this mailing list.  Please be
patient -- don't get upset if I haven't responded to your note in an hour
or two!  I will try to check my mail every evening, but I might go out of
town for the weekend, or I might have something else more important which
needs attending to.  I might even take a real vacation, but I'll warn the
list first.

>choja' nuqDaq *.wav qoj *.ram-ghun!

{choja'} has a problem.  You're not stating a fact, you're giving a
command.  You need the imperative prefix {HI-} if you're going to use
the "shorthand" way of saying "tell me [something]."  See TKD section
4.2.1 for an explanation of imperative verb prefixes.  {nuqDaq} is in
the right place, but the rest of it falls flat.  {qoj} is a *sentence*
conjunction.  To say "this and/or that" where "this" and "that" are
nouns, one puts the word {joq} *after* the two nouns.  See TKD section
5.3 for a full description of conjunctions.  {ghun} is a verb; from the
way you hyphenated it with the "*.ram", it appears you intended to put
them together, but we don't have a way to combine a noun and a verb into
a single word.  I don't see anything in your sentence that says anything
about "finding" the files; and if {ghun} isn't the verb, nothing is.

>Tellme where I can find *.wav or *.ram files

Why say "tell me" at all?  I'd just ask "Where do I find [them]?"
{nuqDaq *.wav *.ram joq vISam?}

RealAudio is kind of a sore spot with our honored system administrator.
I don't expect to find many .ram files around, while .wav and .au files
are usable by more people.  The Klingon Language Institute WWW site has
a collection of short sounds, basically a pronunciation guide.  I know
of at least one Web page with a short Klingon sentence, but nothing more.

>batlh yIHegh

This is grammatically correct, though I don't care for the sentiment.
"Die with honor" isn't something I plan to do just yet. :-)

>Daniel
>
>I haven't got my copy of TKD yet, but I thought I might as well try and get
>it wrong than not try at all.

I respectfully suggest that you thought wrong.  Only half of The Klingon
Dictionary is the word lists; the other (more important, in my opinion)
half is the description of the grammar.  Looking up words is tedious, and
learning the vocabulary *is* important, but unless one knows how to put
the words together to make well-formed sentences, being able to translate
words is irrelevant.  Please read TKD all the way through a couple of times
before trying to write more than an *extremely* simple sentence, or you
won't have much success.

Case in point:  'way back at the top of your note, you say:
>...if you flame me I'll have to regain my honor by SoH HoH!

{SoH HoH} isn't grammatical; "you" as the object of a sentence is indicated
with a verb prefix, not with the word "you".  You've also complicated this
a bit by tossing in a Klingon sentence in the middle of an English phrase.
This particular phrase -- with the word "by" -- is a construct with no real
parallel in Klingon, so there's no good way to switch languages "midstream"
in this example.

I'll often refer to specific sections of TKD when explaining grammatical
points; that's not very useful if you don't have access to them.  Please
don't go away -- I'm really here to help you -- but try to restrain your
enthusiasm until you have "The Book" to guide you.

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




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