[Tlhingan-hol] KLBC - Enthusiastic rambling message to beginning students. In English!

[Qov]

Hello possible beginners!

De'vID has just reminded us that you may be out there, silently 
lurking and a little intimidated by my "gigantic epic."  Mine is 
actually only a regular sized epic, and the lack of general 
enthusiasm for it kinda discourages me from writing a gigantic one 
next, but his point is well taken: it's a lot of Klingon text all at 
once if you've just picked up a Klingon dictionary for the first time 
(which I did in 1988, I believe, but there were no Klingon epics of 
any size to read then, so count yourself lucky). The KLI and the 
mailing list *LOVES* beginners. The one thing that can stop us 
posting small, medium or large sized epics and arguing endlessly 
about grammatical constructs is the opportunity to nurture Klingon 
language beginners on the path to gigantic epic authorship, or at 
least ability to read same. We accept as inevitable the fact that you 
will also join us in interminable arguments about verbs, but there 
will be a sweet spot in the meantime when you will receive a solid 
grounding in what we know for sure and make mistakes we can all agree on.

Please read your Klingon dictionary, attempt to construct sentences 
of your own, and tolerate our group glee in the opportunity to making 
them conform to the very best standards we know. If you want to try 
reading anyone's stories or other communications, even just sitting 
down with one Klingon sentence from the list, your dictionary, and 
lots of patience to work it through, the authors will be delighted to 
help you. Send your work either to the whole mailing list or the 
author themself. It's what the mailing list used to be mainly about. 
Beginners are more people for us to talk to. It's a good group. We 
(mostly) all like one another, and no one in this group has ever 
killed another member, you can look that up. But more of us would be 
even better.

Hint for beginners: If you see a Klingon word in a message to the 
list but can't find that word in your dictionary these are the three 
main possibilities:

1. It's a verb with a prefix on it. If you see the word {qalegh} for 
example, and you look up qal and find corrupt and then get stuck, 
it's because the word isn't qal + egh, it's qa- + legh, and means "I 
see you". Read over the list of prefixes until you get to recognize 
them and can extract the verbs behind them.

2. It's a new word!  We don't make up words, but Marc Okrand, the guy 
who wrote the dictionary still makes up new words, and we collect 
them. Some were published in Klingon for the Galactic Traveler and 
many others are listed at these two sites: 
<http://www.kli.org/tlh/newwords.html>http://www.kli.org/tlh/newwords.html 
http://www.qephom.de/e/newwords.html

3. You're looking in the wrong part of the book. The current edition 
of the Klingon Dictionary has two separate alphabetical lists, 
because they didn't integrate the vocabulary lists of the first and 
second editions.  There are also a few "one-way" words, that you can 
only find in the English to Klingon section, but they are listed in 
the new word lists linked above.

If you're a beginner and you find this message -even in the far 
future in the archives--you can write to me for help. I might even 
come to your town. I'm scary that way.

- Qov

At 04:04 '?????' 5/3/2012, De'vID jonpIn wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Who is the current Beginner's Grammarian?  Is the KLBC (Klingon 
>Language Beginner's Corner) still a thing?
>
>Just wondering because lately the mailing list seems to be dominated 
>by Qov (with her gigantic epic) and myself (with my much less epic 
>translations of short stories).  It occurred to me that any lurkers 
>or beginners just skimming the list might be intimidated by the 
>deluge of posts containing paragraph after paragraph of Klingon with 
>very little English.  The only other kind of post seems to be 
>debates about finer points of grammar, which again is not exactly 
>friendly to newcomers.  Either way, someone who is new to Klingon 
>and just started following the mailing list now may get the mistaken 
>impression that there is no place for beginners, which is certainly 
>not the case.
>
>So, in the interest of encouraging beginners to participate, if 
>you're lurking, please introduce yourself and briefly tell us 
>something about yourself in Klingon.
>
>Also, what do people think of my short story translations?  I'm 
>basically going through a book (Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones), 
>which I happen to have, but if anyone is interested in another genre 
>or whatever I'm open to suggestions.  I was also considering posting 
>a paragraph or a few sentences at a time rather than an entire 
>story, if that would make the text less intimidating to read and 
>encourage more feedback.
>
>--
>De'vID
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