tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Sep 19 20:33:51 1996

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Re: jIlIH'eghqa'

"Perry J. Brulotte" <[email protected]> writes:
>> wa'wIj qab
>> My first was bad.  ("first"??)
>
>wa'DIch = First

[Simply giving a word without explanation, or at least a reference to
more information, is not all that helpful to a beginner, Perry.  We
really ought to wait for trI'Qal to respond, but she seems to be working
through a large backlog of messages.]

TKD section 5.2 discusses numbers.  At the bottom of page 54, the number
suffix {-DIch} is introduced.  It creates "ordinal" numbers like first,
second, third, etc.  Such numbers are placed after nouns to specify the
one being referred to, e.g. {taj loSDIch} "the fourth knife".

An ordinal number might be able to stand alone without a specific noun,
but the only example we have of this happening is the term {cha'DIch}
used with a particular ritual meaning (disturbingly similar to the idea
of a "second" in a duel).  It might not be generalizable to other uses,
so it's probably safer to use a noun to indicate, for instance, that one
is referring to {paq wa'DIch} "the first *book*", or {lojmIt wejDIch}
"the third *door*".

There's another problem that almost all of Mitchell's sentences exhibit:
their word order is wrong.  The correct order of a simple Klingon sentence
is OBJECT-VERB-SUBJECT.  The beginning of TKD chapter 6 describes the basic
syntax in detail.  The subject of the sentence comes last, after the verb.
For example, the sentence "his ship is red" is translated {Doq DujDaj}.
Mitchell's translation of his "My first was bad" sentence above has the
subject incorrectly placed first.

I hope this helps, and I hope nobody gets mad at me for answering.  Usually
questions from beginners are handled by the Beginners' Grammarian, but she
has apparently been busy lately.

-- ghunchu'wI'

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