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

[qurgh lungqIj]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 10:16 AM, David Trimboli <david at trimboli.name> wrote:

>
> 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)?

Obviously it's a form letter with data from fields put in. I don't
manually write this email, so it uses the term "word" to refer to,
what in my database, is 99% words, besides a few short phrases like
this one that are there to help newbies locate relevant information. I
don't see why it's so hard for people to understand that a few of
these pieces are in the database to help people with a limited
knowledge of Klingon. Yes, they aren't perfect, because they break the
standard mold, and I really don't want to spend more time re-writing
code to handle 3 or 4 phrases. It's not worth the time.

Now, if someone wan't to volunteer their time to re-code it for me,
then they are more than welcome....

>
> 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

Phrase is used in my database to represent an entire, complete,
self-contained phrase, like the sayings from The Klingon Way, which
this is not. All the other color words and bits are listed as verbs,
because the majority of them are single verbs or short verb phrases
made up of primary verbs. You can't find this phrase by typing in <Doq
'ej wovbe'>, you can only find it by typing in "brown" so it's there
for English speakers trying to find out what the closest Klingon
word/phrase/etc is for "brown". I guess I should just prevent the Word
of the Day from using these phrases as it confuses the advanced
speakers too much.

>
> 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)

Yes, if they paste the phrase back into the database it will spit out
this break down for them.

qurgh