tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 11 15:59:44 2004
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Re: toQDujwIj vIQaw'law'
naHQun wrote:
>I obviously can't talk about phones,
Sure you can. The word for telephone is {ghogh HablI'} lit. "voice data
transceiving device"! Mark Mandel, whose company helped produce the "Star
Trek: Klingon!" CD game, tells the story:
After we (Dragon Systems) recorded the "native speakers" to make
the acoustic models to build the speech recognition for the Language
Lab on the Klingon CD-ROM, I got the idea of sending each speaker
a formal thank-you letter. I translated our company letterhead into
Klingon and, using the KLIpIqaD font, scissors, tape, and a color
copier, made a bunch of Dragon Systems stationery with Klingon in
{pIqaD} at the top and transliterated Klingon and English in small
type at the bottom. But since this was associated with an official
Klingon product, I wanted to be sure my Klingon was correct. I had
been working with Marc Okrand by phone and email during the project,
and so I sent him the text of my transliterated Klingon letterhead,
asking especially about my word for fax, which at the time was a
compound word with no space. He wrote back, approximately, that
he liked the idea, but he would prefer to express it as a two-word
phrase, {nav HablI'}; and he also suggested the corresponding {ghogh
HablI'} for "telephone".
>let's see if I can talk about vessels
>
> latlh Duj vIleghbe'
> latlh Duj qIp toQDujwIj
> *bumper*Daj ghajbe' latlh Duj
> tlhopDaqDaj ghajbe' toQDujwIj
You could translate "bumper" literally as *{nqeQwI'} from {ngeQ} "bump
into, run into, collide with", but it turns out that we already have the
perfect word: {QanwI'} "guard" (lit. "protector"), the protective armor
plating around a wing cannon on -- wait for it! -- a {toQDuj}!
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons