tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Nov 21 10:30:49 2009

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Re: Klingon Sentence Structure

Tracy Canfield ([email protected])



First identify the verb - the action in the sentence.  That's "visited".

Now identify the subject - the people (or things) doing the visiting.
"You and I"

Finally, the object is what gets visited.  "Earth."

So the basic word order is going to be something like

Earth - visited - you and I

"Earth" is easy; it's tera'.

"You and I" is a little trickier because it's a compound noun phrase.
(Though you could just say "we", maH.)  Klingon has two different
words for "you" depending on whether you're talking to one or two
people, a distinction English doesn't bother with.  If it's just one
person, it's SoH.  If it's more than one, it's tlhIH.

you - SoH
I - jIH

When you're putting two nouns together, the connecting word goes after them.

you and I - SoH jIH je

The last thing is the word "visit".  Assuming you can use it to visit
a place and not just a person, and I'm sure someone will tell me if I
can't use it with the name of a place, it's Such.

We have to do two things to get Such in the right form. First, it has
to agree with the subject and the object - in other words, we have to
put a prefix on the verb that matches the subject and the object.  In
the verb prefix chart, we pick the prefix for the subject "we" that
goes with the object "it" - wI-.

Finally, since the visit is completed, we need an aspect suffix -
something that tells whether an action is completed, in progress, or
neither.  The marker for a completed action is -pu'.

visited - wISuchpu'

Put them all together and you get

tera' wISuchpu' jIH SoH je


2009/11/21  <[email protected]>:
>
> I got my Klingon Dictionary and I have been trying to figure out how to write a grammatically correct Klingon sentence.  I haven't been able to figure it out. Can someone help me (in English please)?
>
> Sample sentence: You and I visited Earth.
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>
> n00b
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