tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 28 20:22:22 1997
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KLBC: betleH & other stuff
I am disturbed. Long ago, I checked my Klingon dictionary to
translate "batleth" (as it was pronounced on TNG). I decided it must
be "honor sword," which would be batlh'etlh. The revised KD had
betleH, "a type of hand weapon." I dismissed this as being some other
weapon. It now seems that this is, in fact, the correct word for the
honor sword. Why not batlh'etlh?
Just got The Klingon Way (audio tape). Worf must be from the boonies
(or living with humans all these years has seriously impaired his
proficiency with thlIngan Hol). His accent is as bad as those guys'
on the Klingon CD! Hardly any glottal stops at all! (Qapla instead
of Qapla'?)
While listening to the Conversational Klingon tape again, I noticed
that for twelve hundred, we hear cha'mach wa' vatlh. Surely this is
twenty-one hundred! Further, shouldn't twelve hundred be one thousand
two hundred (wa'SaD cha'vatlh)? Are numbers written (and said)
differently when used for time?
In CK (is this the correct abbreviation for the Conversational Klingon
audio tape?), one of the initial curses soundslike ghuy'cha', but in
the addendum to the KD (revised), it is shown as ghay'cha'. Am I
missing an integral part of the pronunciation somewhere? The "uy"
phoneme is not shown with the other "y" endings.
At this point, I can't even tell if I got the word order right for my
sig! As I am not constructing a complete sentence, I'm not sure where
to put the two modifiers to "student." Heart of targ is written as
"targ heart," so I think "student of Klingon language" would be
"Klingon language student." Terran, I guess, would come at the end,
as "six big phasers" is jav pu'mey tin.
Scott D. Randel
---------------
"The perversity of the universe
tends toward a maximum."