tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 24 19:00:22 2001
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Re: The beauty of Klingon
ja' Matthew Pennington <[email protected]>:
>...I
>realized that 90% of all Klingon sentences express the same idea as
>in English, but only use two-thirds of the space. I would call that
>beautifully short. GBO! To any newcomers to the list, the brevity
>alone makes Klingon worth studying.
The "Great Economical Contest" in HolQeD was based on that observation,
inviting people to submit Klingon sentences with remarkably long English
translations. I'd like to have seen more of the entries, but I wasn't a
judge.
I exaggerated the concept somewhat for a qep'a' Cabaret presentation a
couple of years ago, speaking short phrases such as {peqIm!} and having a
partner translate them -- somewhat embellished -- along the lines of
"Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention for a moment?" :)
By the way, I've discovered that the brevity doesn't extend to the spoken
language quite as well as I expected. The syllable structure doesn't make
it very easy to slur things together, and the very thing which makes words
so concise works against trying to understand them when spoken extremely
quickly. Perhaps in a decade or so, when there are enough extremely fluent
Klingonists, we might find that no longer to be the case.
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh