tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue May 29 17:07:50 2001

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Re: A little Poetry



ja' Brian:

>	tangqua ghajpu' mughato' pI'
>	'ach DaH 'oHDaj ghajHa'qu' ghaH

You know already about *<<tangqua>> and <<tangqa'>>.

>tangqua and mughato' are vague approximations of cow/bull and monkey/ape; 
>the
>creature names are attested in the supplemental vocabulary on www.kli.org.
>"Chunky" is in the sense of "stocky, chubby, somewhat fat," which seems to 
>be
>adequately translated as pI' or ror.

maj. I'm not a KLI grammarian, but I believe this is about as close as 
you're going to get in this: Klingons don't have cows :) See the replies 
regarding <<pI'>> and <<ror>> occurring (or not) in canon.

>Is it correct to put noun suffixes on a pronoun? 'oHDaj - his it? I can
>fill the space in with something else or simply leave it out if need be and
>have an uneven line length.

I had a sentence corrected a while ago by charghwI' in which he told me noun 
suffixes in some sentences *are* best put on the pronoun, as in the original 
corrected sentence:

     tlhIngan mu' ghaHHey <<loDnI'>>
     The Klingon word for "brother" is apparently <<loDnI'>>

Here, the pronoun <<ghaH>> does take a suffix, the apparent <<-Hey>>, so it 
would seem correct that pronouns can take noun suffixes.

>Have I horribly misestimated the stressed syllables? I've placed stress on
>the verbal suffixes pu' and Ha' on the assumption that aspect/negation are
>particularly important in this case, and thus would be emphasized. I'm also
>unsure about the stress in mughato'; I think the stress normally goes on 
>the
>last syllable, but I've munged it into the penult. Does this seem terribly
>awkward?

With your verb suffixes, I think the change in emphasis would be acceptable; 
we can emphasise any word in a sentence, including words that don't normally 
take stress (cf. <<'ach>> "but"), and I think the same applies for suffixes.
In the second, you're correct; the stress *does* normally fall on the final 
syllable of nouns. It sounds a little strange, but as far as I know stress 
pattern isn't so rigid as something like suffix order; there are no suffixes 
that the syllable <<-to'>> could be confused with.
In the second sentence, I'm not so sure you need <<'oHDaj>>; <<'oH>> would 
probably do fine. However, you *are* writing a poem, so this could probably 
be left as it is. But remember, here <<'oH>> takes the stress, not <<-Daj>>, 
making the stress pattern (daDADAdaDAdaDA). Quite irregular; but remember, 
Klingon poetry isn't necessarily the same as ours :)

In all, I think it's a good effort. majQa'!

Qapla',

ro'Han
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