tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 02 19:39:26 2000

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RE: [KLBC]Re: A poem

jatlh Doq tera' loD:

> qaleghDI', ( When I see you,)
> tlqDoy' je tlq'HoS jIghaj (I have weary heart and weary soul.)
> nuq Daq ta' Sov ghobe' (Not knowing what to do) <--- I need help on that.

> I think the first two are fine. Let me know if those are wrong though. 
> I know the last one is.

One of the annoying things about the writing convention we use for Klingon
is that the uppercase i and the lower case L look the same in a sans serif
font. If your mail program has a serif font, like Courier, I'd reccommend
switching to that. It's not a big deal once you are used to it, though -
Klingon has a fairly fixed pattern for its syllables, so you'll rarely find
a big i or little L in a place where it could be misinterpreted.

So on to your stuff: <tIqDoy' je tIq'HoS jIghaj>. A few problems here, but
much better. First, while verbs acting as adjectives do go after the nouns
they modify, you need a space: <tIq Doy'> and <tIq HoS>. You got the right
conjunction (<je>), but noun conjunctions go after the final noun in
Klingon, so it's <tIq Doy', tIq HoS je>. <tIq HoS> is "a strong heart",
which is fine, but not what you said in the English. That would be <qa'
Doy'> - "a tired spirit". Finally, you got the prefix half right. The
subject is indeed "I", but the object is "A weary heart and a weary soul",
which you'll find on the chart as "them" - 3rd person plural. The prefix for
this is <vI->. Here's the whole thing:

tIq Doy', qa' Doy' je vIghaj.

I also have a comment that somewhere between grammar and style - in English
we say things like "I have red hair", but a Klingon may well interpret this
as something like "I've got a bunch of somebody's hair in my hand, and it's
red". Instead, a Klingon would probably say "My hair is red". Applying this
to your sentence, you get:

Doy' tIqwIj 'ej Doy' qa'wI'.

This time the "and" conjunction is a sentence conjunction - <'ej> - and it
goes between the two sentences.


Next bit: <nuq Daq ta' Sov ghobe'> - "not knowing what to do". This one is
genuinely hard in Klingon. Klingon just doesn't have grammar analogous to
this (and neither do some other Earth languages), so you have to rephrase it
a bit. The most literal thing I can come up with is: <Qu' vIta'nISbogh
vISovbe'> - "I do not know the task I need to accomplish", but that's
probably not what you mean. Perhaps someone else on the list has a
suggestion.


pagh
Beginners' Grammarian

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