[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: Doq 'ej wovbe'

[David Trimboli]

On 10/15/2012 9:48 AM, qurgh lungqIj wrote:
>
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Rohan Fenwick - QeS 'utlh
> <qeslagh at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I was going to keep my trap shut, but I'm glad someone else has raised this.
>> With all due respect to qurgh, and not wanting to sound like a pedantic old
>> curmudgeon ('coz it's led to fiery confrontation before and I don't want
>> that), Doq 'ej wovbe' isn't a verb;
>
> But "be brown" is a verb and the phrase is made up of two verbs. This
> entry is primarily for English speakers searching for relevant words
> in my database, so if they search for "brown" they get an example of
> how to say brown instead of getting nothing. If it was listed as a
> noun they, not knowing how Klingon works, would just throw in <Doq 'ej
> wovbe'> thinking it's a complete noun phrase for brown (the way nagh
> beQ is a phrase for a "painting"), it's also not chuvmey, so it's
> listed a verb because it's a "verb phrase" that has a known meaning
> and the verb parts can be conjugated normally (you could say jIDoq 'ej
> jIwovbe').

The original post says

    Klingon word: Doq 'ej wovbe'
    Part of speech: verb
    Definition: be brown

What you've got here says that {Doq 'ej wovbe'} is a word, which it's 
not, and that its a verb, which it also is not. The English translation 
is a verbal phrase, but who would look up a Klingon word according to 
its English part of speech (especially a "be something" verb)?

If this entry appeared in an English-to-Klingon dictionary, it would 
appear thus:

    brown, be brown
    Doq 'ej wovbe' (phrase)

If it appeared in a Klingon-to-English dictionary, it would appear thus:

    Doq 'ej wovbe' (phrase)
    be brown

If someone wanted to know more about the components of the phrase, they 
could look up the individual parts:

    Doq (v)
    be red, orange

    wov (v)
    be light, bright

    'ej (conj) [assuming this wasn't just listed as {chuvmey}]
    and (joining)

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/