tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 11 11:04:17 1996

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Re: Having heard through Power Klingon...

>Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 06:21:32 -0400
>From: "Mark J. Reed" <[email protected]>
>Subject: Re: Having heard through Power Klingon...
>Message-ID: <[email protected]>

>Nick Nicholas wrote:
>> 2. For "you do not deserve to live" on the opening dialogue, I heard
>> it as a reasonably clear "DayIntaH 'e' Daqotlhbe'".
>I still hear "bIyIntaH", which is more grammatical.

Er, I meant, of course, bIyIntaH 'e' Daqotlhbe'. reH latlh qabDaq qul tuj 
law', Hoch tuj puS.

>And "disable" is {Qotlh}, not {qotlh}.  Of course, "You don't tickle that
>you continue to live!" could just be one of those odd Klingon idioms. :)

Well, I don't see how "you don't disable your living" makes more sense than 
any other alternative (I was thinking Qoch here, but that's similary 
nonsensical here.) Besides, it was recently discussed here that Okrand 
revealed the word used here --- which he didn't remember any more --- really 
was 'deserve'. And as for qotlh, it put me in mind of 'die with tickling' (a 
Hamlet phrase), but hey, what's one more homophony...

>> 3. To my exasperation, PK has both transitive and intransitive usages 
>> of "tagh". Here's hoping this is not a general trend...
>I thought {tagh} was already clearly transitive from the "initiate"
>gloss.  The fact that it can be used intransitively as well is
>convenient - too much so.

The canon for this is "mu'qaD veS taghlu'bej". I don't now remember if tagh 
was used transitively in PK, now; but it's definitely so used in TKW.

>A sad Englishish muddying of the waters - I
>would have preferred {tagh'egh} for that case.  (Actually, I would
>have preferred an intransitive base verb transitivized in the usual
>way with {-moH}, but for some reason Dr. Okrand didn't consult with
>me when developing the original vocabulary . . .)

My own strategy has been Volap"ukian --- assume intransitive by defualt, 
because -moH is well-defined, and we don't have any consistent 
intransitivisers. But you know, I think what's really happening with us 
Klingonists is that there's so many Esperantists and Lojbanists here, we 
expect well-defined verb valency. It is a sad Englishishism --- but English is 
far from the only language which has verbs behaving both transitively and 
intransitively. Like I say, let's hope it stays a one-off; the vem/vemmoH type 
pairs in the dictionary should guarantee that.

What's really noticable about the reading of the Klingon is the disfluencies 
in pausing and stress. This is painful in the actors, though the Klingon 
trader, as I said, acquits himself quite well. In fact, he reminds me of the 
Worf send-up on a local public-radio parody, Wrath Of Galactatron. (Us being 
non-rhotic Australians [i.e. we don't pronounce syllable-final 'r's, the 
character sounds like a cross between Dorn and Jimmy Stewart [whose 'r's are 
the stuff of legend], with Kirkian prosody [sentence tune]!)

I don't like Okrand's own stress, to tell the truth. It's true he's allowed to 
violate his own stress rules, because he gave them provisional status anyway 
in TKD, but on the tape he merely stresses every suffix --- noun or verb, 
ending in glottal stop or not --- with the exception of -neS, and he doesn't 
really do sentence stress --- each word gets just about the same stress. (Not 
impossible as a possible way of speaking for Klingon, I admit, but unlikely 
nonetheless.) Personally, I think he overdoes the glottal stop and the Q, too: 
far better, in my estimation, to scream the vowels and speak fast enough for 
some consistently furious prosody to come about, than to make such a 
song-and-dance about each Q and '. Klingon fury should be conveyed by each a 
and D, as well as the ' and Q. (When I get my web page off line, I will offer 
samples of my maaahvelous Klingon diction for general edification :-)

-- 
NON ME TENENT VINCVLA NON ME TENET CLAVIS    STETIT PVELLA RVFA TVNICA SIQVIS
       Nick Nicholas      http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~nsn   Linguistics
QVAERO MEI SIMILES ET ADIVNGOR PRAVIS        EAM TETIGIT TVNICA CREPVIT EIA
     [email protected]           University of Melbourne
ARCHIPOETAE CONFESSIO                        E CARMINIBVS BVRANIS

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