[Tlhingan-hol] Fwd: RE: Klingon Scrabble

[Rohan Fenwick - QeS 'utlh]

jatlhpu' Qov:
> It's not very many words you have there, so probably only 'ay''a' 
> wa'. It would be interesting to compare to Hamlet or any other manuscript.

(poD vay')

jIjatlhpu' jIH:
> The comparison to the list from nuq bop bom is intriguing. For 
> starters, in my text qaghwI' is the most frequent of ALL letters!

mujang Qov, jatlh:
> I noticed and wondered about that. I'll have to pay attention to 
> style. Maybe you're fonder of certain affixes.

Quite possible. I haven't the skill, time, or desire to work out an accurate way of counting affix representations, but the following counts of raw syllables that correspond to certain affixes with qaghwI' in them may reveal something:

pu': 963
wI': 773
qu': 616
Ha': 464
chu': 364
lu': 350
'a': 312
qa': 239

and also these, for which removal of most non-affix forms was straightforward:

be': 618 (not counting 145 instances of {be'} at the start of a word)
'e': 421 (not counting  535 instances of the stand-alone word {'e'})
ta': 238 (not counting 45 instances of {ta'} at the start of a word)

jIH:
> The two other big discrepancies are /gh/ and /v/, both of which are 
> more common in my list: /v/ and /gh/ are 9th and 13th in mine, 
> compared to 12th and 17th in Qov's. I'd put this down to narrative 
> style, as a great deal of mIl'oD veDDIr SuvwI' is people talking to 
> and about themselves: there's likely a lot of vI- and -'egh causing 
> this. The frequency of /j/ also agrees with that, as does the fact 
> that /I/ (in both /jI-/ and /vI-/) outranks both /e/ and /o/, where 
> it doesn't for nuq bop bom.

Qov:
> I thought my characters talked too much, but I do try to have them DO 
> things rather than say them.

Yeah, my characters do talk a lot about what happened to them in the past. A lot of this bom sets the scene with frame-tale telling.

jIH:
> All my other letters, though, differ by two places or less from 
> Qov's list. /ng/ is last for me too, by a very considerable margin. 
> The fact that /ch/ is actually *less* frequent for me is odd, 
> though, because I happen to know that my natural form for "but" (one 
> of the most frequent words in written text) is /'ach/ while Qov more 
> usually seems to uses /'a/.

Qov:
> Maybe I use 'a more than you, or more often in speech, but in the nuq 
> bop bom overall word count I got:
> 1089    'ach
> 295     'a

Ahh, fair enough. My count at the moment is 267 and 0. :) (I should probably mix it up a bit more with the varieties of different speakers. I just never think to vary function words like "but" and "yes".)

> And I only used ngagh and it's derivatives about twenty times. :P

Huh. Is that all? Is it just your racy metaphor that made me think it was much more? ;)

QeS
 		 	   		  
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