tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat May 10 12:19:46 1997

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

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

RE: KLBC: My first post

jatlh K'Tan:

> I have been working on improving my command of Klingon so a while now and
> have started to experiment with poetry.  The following is the first line
> of a poem I am working on.

Welcome to the list!

Let me just give you a warning: poetry is a tough way to begin speaking 
Klingon.  There are many metaphores and similies, and not-too-literaly 
phrases.  Better to start with ordinary sentences.  However . . .

> HotjIH meQpu' qa'Iw (I feel the burning of your blood)

Your first task should be to go over TKD section 6.  The first thing it 
discusses is Klingon sentence order.  Do not just follow the English original. 
 Use the order Obj-Verb-Subj.  In the above sentence, "I" am doing the action. 
 The action, or verb, is "feel."  The object is "the burning of your blood."

This actually becomes quite messy, for several reasons.  First, {Hot} "touch, 
feel" probably must be taken literally.  You're not really sticking out your 
finger and feeling some blood.  Unfortunately (perhaps), there's no catch-all 
verb for "experience."

In TKW, there is a proverb: {'IwlIj ghogh yIQoy} "Listen to the voice of your 
blood."  Perhaps you would care to use the verb {Qoy} "hear" instead.  I shall 
proceed with this verb.  If you choose another, just substitute it in.

(By the way, you might also try this as "When your blood burns, mine burns 
also."  This seems closer to your intent, but it's a lot more complicated.)

So, we're working for "I hear the burning of your blood."  "The burning of 
your blood" is a bit difficult, so let's come back to that in a minute.  For 
now, just realize that it is a singular, third-person noun phrase, an "it."

So how do we say "I hear it"?  Let's follow the Klingon sentence order.  The 
object, {'oH} "it," will come first.  Then, the verb {Qoy}.  Finally, the 
subject, {jIH} "I."  Now, whenever you use a verb in a sentence, you've got to 
give it an appropriate prefix.  Use the table on page 33 of TKD.  
Cross-reference subject "I" with object "it."  You get {vI-}.  This is a 
prefix, so it goes on the front of the verb.

'oH vIQoy jIH.
I hear it.

Note that you can drop unneeded pronouns.  {vI-} is a pretty clear pronoun, 
and if I simply said {vIQoy}, the subject *has* to be plural, so you can drop 
the {jIH}.  You may not want to drop the object pronoun, depending on how 
clear your context is.

Now, what do I hear?  "The burning of your blood."  We have no noun for 
"burning."  Klingon does not focus too much on nouns.  Instead, let's make 
this a sentence, too.

"Your blood burns."  The subject is "your blood."  This is constructed from 
the noun for "blood," {'Iw}.  See TKD section 3.3.4.  Here you'll see all of 
the possessive suffixes.  Look for "your."  Since blood cannot speak, you must 
choose the suffix {-lIj}.  "Your blood" is {'IwlIj}.

The verb is "burns."  There is not object.  Just plug all of this into the 
Klingon sentence order:

meQ 'IwlIj.
Your blood burns.

Look on the table on p.33 again.  Cross-reference first-person singular 
subject ("your blood," "it") with "no-object."  You see a zero.  This means 
that you use no prefix at all.  Therefore, the sentence {meQ 'IwlIj} is 
complete.

Now, how do we say "I hear the burning of your blood"?  Let's recast this into 
the two sentences he have constructed:

"I hear that your blood burns."

This is where it gets tricky.  Read TKD section 6.2.5 very carefully.  We need 
a sentence-as-object construction.  You cannot just stick one sentence before 
the other.  You have to use the special pronoun {'e'}.

Assume for a moment that {'e'} means exactly "Your blood burns."  With this, 
we could say {'e' vIQoy}.  All of the sentence "your blood burns" is contained 
inside the pronoun {'e'}.  If we do this, we've got our entire sentence!

Now, how do we let others know what {'e'} means?  We couldn't just walk up to 
someone and say {'e' vIQoy}.  They'd what to know *what* we heard!  To do 
this, you actually state the sentence which describes what you're hearing, and 
then the sentence tell that you are hearing.  This is a bit confusing, so see 
this:

meQ 'IwlIj 'e' vIQoy.
I hear that your blood burns.
I hear the burning of your blood.

I can use some brackets to show you how this is arranged:

[meQ 'IwlIj] ['e' vIQoy].

As TKD 6.2.5 tells us, you always state the object sentence first, and then 
the main sentence.  We're done!

> I am also interested in what would be a good word/phrase to express the
> Terran concept of Passion or Desire.

Well, there's {neH} "want," but this is a little bland.  There's {parmaq}, 
which is the Klingon idea of love, but it's not the Terran idea, and we're not 
even sure yet if it's a noun.  Look for verbs, not nouns!  And let your 
context decide your word choices.  I can easily tell you how to say something 
in a particular context, but it's very difficult to try to translate words one 
at a time.

-- 
SuStel
Beginners' Grammarian
Stardate 97357.1

Back to archive top level