Re: KLBC

[Steven Boozer <sboozer@midway.uchicago.edu>]

Dawut wrote:

>qeylIS SaHbogh tetlh muq tlhIngan qum
>The Klingon government have a volume of scroll which concern Kahless.
>
>I am under the impression that {muq} "have a volume of"
>is related to music or sound measurement. I couldn't find
>it in the KGT text when I quick-scanned it, so I don't have
>anything to support its context. Other than my confusion on
>the nature of {muq}, the sentence looks okay to me.

I'll let BG pagh handle the grammar of this sentence; I just want to make
one observation about the vocabulary.

Not sound, but size.  {muq} "have a volume of" is a verb of measurement
refering to physical volume.  Such as, "The volume of this sphere is 20
cubic meters."  Klingon volume is measured in {tlho'ren}.  Marc Okrand on
the startrek.klingon newsgroup (October 1997):

	The only unit of volume I'm aware of is {tlho'ren}. I'm not 
	exactly sure how much one {tlho'ren} is, but it seems to be 
	in the quart/liter range.

Okrand hasn't used {muq} in a sentence yet, but it probably works like
other verbs of measurement:

	wej 'ujmey 'ab 'oy'naQ 
	Painstiks are a little over one meter long (S32)

	wejvatlh loSmaH loS vI' vagh wej 'uj 'aD Duj
	Length: 120 M
	("the ship has a length of 345.53 {'uj}") (BoP Poster)

	wejvatlh SochmaH vagh SaD cheb'a'mey ngI' Duj
	Mass: 8.7 KT
	("the ship weighs 375,000 {cheb'a'}") (BoP Poster)

Thus:

	cha'maH tlho'renmey muq 'Iw HIq qeghvam
	This barrel of bloodwine has a volume of 20 {tlho'ren}


-- 
Voragh                       
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons