tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 08 15:38:38 1998

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

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

Re: CyberPete

I've been watching this message a couple days now, waiting for pagh to
get to it, but it looks like he's busy and I *don't* want the only
response Peter gets to his interest in Klingon to be abuse over
posting Marc Okrand's telephone number.

jabbI'IDDaj bolaDqu'chugh wa'maH cha' ben bogh 'e' botu'.  petuv!

---CyberPete iHaveNone <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Could someone help me with klingon. 

Sure thing!  We're almost all willing to help.  The primary helper
person right now is pagh, but he seems to have been busy the last
couple of days, so I'm going to risk his wrath and answer dome of your
questions for you.

>I'v got the dictionary 

Good.  That's necessary to learn.  You also need to read it.  Not just
read the wordlist, but read the grammar at the front.  I recommend you
start with sections 2 to 6. 

> but it's a hassel to look every word up.

Yeah, isn't it?  I found it such a hassle I memorized it all.  If you
want to speak and understand people speaking you will have to memorize
a good number of the words.  ter'eS has written an excellent program
to help you memorize them, available at
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/2711/kliflash.html and Holtej
has written a program to help you read and write, called pojwI',
available at http://www.bigfoot.com/~dspeers/klingon/poj.htm

> I know a few like:SoH you,baH fire,maH us/we. 

Good.  Make sure you read section 5.1 and section 4.1.1 to see how and
when /SoH and /maH/ are used and not used.  You might be surprised. 
Klingon is very unlike English. For example, "you fire" is /bIbaH/ -
it doesn't use /SoH/ at all.

> How to learn Klingon?

Just like you are doing: read the dictionary, try out what you learn,
post some here for feedback, repeat forever. (You can get reasonably
good in a few months of hard work, but you never get perfect).

> jIH wa'maH cha' DIS(tera')qan

I can understand this, but that's because you have looked up all the
words in an English message and put their Klingon equivalents in the
same order.  Writing Klingon is a bit more complicated than that.
Klingons don't say "I am X years old" they say "X years ago I had been
born."  And there are more tricks, because they don't put the words in
the order that we do.  It comes out:

/wa'maH cha' ben jIboghpu'/

Look at: section 6.1 to see why the date come first
         section 4.1.1 to see where the /jI-/ comes from
     and section 4.2.7 to see where the /-pu'/ comes from

But don't worry about all that yet.  It's a complex sentence, and an
idiom, an expression you had no way of knowing from just the
dictionary. (We've been told this and a few other things by Marc
Okrand and in his other books over the years.  Stick around and you'll
learn them).

Here are some easier sentences to try translating, once you've read
the grammar.

The commander conquers the planet.
A student rescues the emperor.
The child strokes a pet.

Make sure you read section 6.1 or you will get the word order confused!

Qapla'.

And please, don't telephone Marc Okrand.  You're free to telephone ME,
however.  (This goes for anyone who e-mails me for the phone number). 
I'll even speak English, if you ask nicely. :)
==
Qov - pab 'utlh





_________________________________________________________
DO YOU YAHOO!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

Back to archive top level