tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jun 01 17:57:30 1997

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

RE: KLBC: <*Hovleng: tlhIngan> audiotape

jatlh tlha'noD:

> *Hovleng: tlhIngan <audiotape> vIje'pu'.  vI'Ijpu'.   
> I bought the Star Trek: Klingon audiotape.  I listened to it.

In The Klingon Way, we get the proverb "Listen to the voice of your blood," 
which is {'IwlIj ghogh yIQoy}.  Okrand specifically uses {Qoy} instead of 
{'Ij}.  He says something about "hearing" involving more concentration than 
"listening," (which seems a bit backward), but it may be that he was simply 
using {Qoy} because it is definitely transitive.  You can "hear something," 
but you cannot "listen something."  I have no proof that {'Ij} is not also 
transitive, except for this proverb and TKD's gloss of "listen," an 
intransitive word in English.  If it were meant to be transitive, I think he 
would have written it as "listen to."

So, say {vIQoypu'} "I have listened to it."

Oh, you used those {-pu'} suffixes because you have completed these actions, 
right?  You're not mistaking them for past tense, are you?

> tlhIngan Hol jatlh tlhInganpu'.  tlhIngan Hol jatlhchu'be'!
> The Klingons (on the tape) speak <tlhIngan Hol>.  They don't speak it
> clearly/perfectly!

For both of these instances of {jatlh}, we have a plural third-person subject 
{tlhInganpu'} and a singular third-person subject {tlhIngan Hol}.  The prefix 
chart on TKD page 33 tells us that the appropriate prefix here is {lu-}.

tlhIngan Hol lujatlh tlhInganpu'.  tlhIngan Hol jatlhchu'be'!

> munuQ!  lInuQ'a'?
> They bother me.  Do they bother you-all?  
> 
> Is using a question mark with interrogative suffixes redundant?

Not at all.  Remember, the text we write is not what Klingons actually use.  
Who knows if they even *have* punctuation.  But when you're reading it with 
ASCII letters, you need the clarification of punctuation.  You cannot hear the 
intonation through text.

Besides, I could say,

Is using a question mark for this sentence redundant

You could look at it and figure out that it *must* be a question by the 
wording, but it's tough to read it without that question mark.

> And, by the way, is the <tlhIngan Hol> on the CD-ROM (upon which the tape is
> based) as bad as the language on the tape?

The Immersion Studies (the story about Pok) has some so-so Klingon.  The 
Language Lab, however, has excellent Klingon (Robert O'Reilly makes a few 
mistakes, but overall he does a great job).

-- 
SuStel
Beginners' Grammarian
Stardate 97418.3

Back to archive top level