tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Nov 15 08:27:54 1997

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RE: bIQ'a' Doq bIngDaq

  In discussing a sea voyage with Alan Anderson
<[email protected]>:-
> In the dictionary I have, every definition of the verb "dive" involves
> descending motion ... that "SCUBA diving" doesn't actually mean continuous
> descending. I'm pointing out that "dive" in this context is somewhat of a
> jargon word ... same contextual connotation for the word {ghIr}.

  In English a scuba diver can say "dive" = "be underwater" and "descend" for
"while in the water, go deeper". In Klingon in the above case both alike would
be {ghIr}, risking unclearness in the middle of fast action commands. After
c.300 scuba dives I appreciate such things.

> > > and it [= a ship] had orbited Ras Muhammad
> > I intended "it rounded [the headland called] R.M.": but "orbited" was the
> >nearest that I could find.
> How about {juS}?

  We did not pass (= {juS}) it in straight travel, we turned round it and went
up the Gulf of Suez for a bit. It cannot be denied that the vocabulary of TKD
leans much towards space travel rather than travel on a planet's surface.
  Sha`b Mahmud is a coral reef.

  Re {-pu'}: I realize that I fell into an error of using it like the English
past tense. I was perhaps also misled by my experience with Arabic and Hebrew,
which like Klingon have an imperfective (yaktubu = yikhtov = ghItlh) and a
perfective (kataba = kathav = ghItlhpu'), but seem to use the perfective
continuously in narrating past events.
    ............................................
  And re sea and land travel: how do people express the compass directions
reasonably compactly (north, east, south, west)? They are not in TKD or KGT.
  What is Klingon for "sun"? The story with the Romulan ale explosion had to
say "starlight" for what was clearly sunlight. OK, to interstellar space
travellers "sun" is ambiguous between "Earth's Sun" and "any star" and "the
star of the planetary system that we or our ship is in now"; but before the
Klingons had space travel they surely had a separate word for the Qo'noS
system's sun as distinct from the faint remote dots in their night sky.

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