tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 02 18:38:12 2000

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RE: A poem



Welcome to the list. My name is pagh, and I'm the current Beginners'
Grammarian for the list. Whenever you have a post you want help with, mark
it with a KLBC in the subject line. I recently got a new job, so I've been
unable to keep up with the list, but I think I'm settled enough now to
continue.


jatlh Doq tera' loD:

> I wrote a poem and I want to translate it into tlhIngan-Hol. 
> But I am having trouble with some of it.

> My first line is: When I see you,

> I need "When" translated but all I have is ghorgh. But that is 
> for a question and its not "ghorgh jiH legh SoH?"

You are correct: <ghorgh> is only for asking a question like "When do we
leave?". There is no word for "when" in phrases like "When I see you" -
Klingon grammar handles it in another way. In this case, it's a verb suffix.

In general, it looks like you've looked through the vocabulary of The
Klingon Dictionary, but you skipped the grammar section. The grammar section
is actually much more important. Klingon is very different from English, so
you can't just pick out words and assemble them in English word order and
come up with Klingon. Read through the grammar section of TKD a few times
and you'll have a much better idea of how to write Klingon.

Now let's analyze your phrase. We'll ignore the "when" for now to make
things easier - we'll deal with it later. Without the "when", you have "I
see you" - pretty simple. The first thing you need to know about sentences
in Klingon is the order things go in. In English, it's subject, then verb,
then object. Klingon is different - object verb subject. An example is <puq
legh yaS> - "The officer sees the child". The child - <puq> is the object,
and he (or she) goes at the beginning. The officer - <yaS> - is the subect
and goes at the end. So "I see you" would be something like <SoH legh jIH>
rather than the other way around.

That's not quite right, though, because in Klingon, verbs have to have
prefixes. The prefix indicates the person (I/you/he/she/it) and number
(singular/plural) of both the subject and object. There's a very nice chart
of all the prefixes in TKD (section 4.1, I think). Since the subect is "I"
and the object is "you" (I'm assuming singular), a quick lookup in the table
finds the prefix <qa->. This gives you <SoH qalegh jIH>.

Finally, pronouns like <SoH> and <jIH> are optional in most cases in
Klingon, and are usually omitted, so "I see you" would really be a one word
sentence: <qalegh>. Leaving out the pronouns may seem weird to an English
speaker, but it's quite natural even in some other Earth langauges,
including Spanish.

Now we'll deal with the "when". Klingon doesn't have words for things like
"when", "while", "because", "before", etc. Instead, Klingon has a group of
verb suffixes that do this job. The one for "when" or "as soon as" is
<-DI'>. So "When I see you, ..." would be:

qaleghDI', ...


pagh
Beginners' Grammarian


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