[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: He'

[lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com]

Okay, then. I will go into grammatical detail, agreeing that for being new with the language, you got a lot of it right. 

Let’s go word by word, and not take this so much as a critique as it is an opportunity for education. With the first word, the education simply has to do with what the rest of us have settled on for conventions of punctuation. You have:

‘roS’

The problem is that an apostrophe, in the Romanized Klingon alphabet used in The Klingon Dictionary, is not punctuation. It’s an actual letter of the alphabet; a consonant, like a “t” or a “p”. It’s the sound you make in the middle of the “oops” word “uh-oh” (or rather the way you stop making sound in the middle of the word “uh-oh”). It’s the phonetic equivalent of that hyphen in uh-oh. The main difference is that in Klingon, you don’t just use it to separate one syllable from another. You can begin or end a syllable with this “sound”.

So, you can’t use it for quotations. Here on the list, we’ve informally come to agree that you use << and >> as quotation marks in Klingon text. So, simply correcting this one reasonable error, we’d have:

{<<roS>> wIpong, ‘ej pong pIm wIpongchugh, pIw ‘ey He’’e’ taH}.

As you have already picked up, we use curly braces {} to surround Klingon text, but usually, we do that when the Klingon text is streamed amid English text, as I would do if I wanted to mention the Klingon word {roS}. If we write Klingon on a separate line from any English text, we don’t usually bother with the braces.

Meanwhile, you don’t really want the Klingon word {roS}. You want a transliteration of the word “rose”, which pronounces the “s” with a “z” sound that is alien to Klingon. It’s a sound that isn’t part of the language, the way that the French “r” and the German “ch" are not a part of the English language.

Until you have more experience with transliteration, you probably want to just keep English names English. Since we know that a lowercase “s” doesn’t exist in Klingon, it’s not confusing if we say:

<<rose>> wIpong ‘ej pong pIm wIpongchugh, …

This is fine as is. It might be nice to expand on the beginning a little, just to be clearer:

tIvamvaD <<rose>> wIpong ‘ach pong pIm wIpongchugh, …

This is totally optional. If context is enough that we all know what you are talking about when you say “rose”, that might work. I just added a reference to what we are calling a rose. It’s not easy to do in Klingon because we don’t have a lot of botany words. English dictionaries are FULL of them. Try playing Quiddler or Scrabble without resorting to names of plants or animals and see how far you get.

I also replaced {‘ej} with {‘ach} because logically “and” and “but” mean exactly the same thing, though “but” carries the additional subjective sense of “unlike what you might expect”. In either case, you are using a conjunction that describes a context with two true statements, but if you use “and”, one usually expects both to be true, and if you use “but”, then you might otherwise, having heard the first fact, expect the second fact to be false. I like you, but I don’t LIKE like you.

tIvamvaD <<rose>> wIpong ‘ach pong pIm wIpongchugh, pIw ‘ey He’’e' taH.

Okay, we have a couple of problems here. You are best served to omit the {‘e’} and use the verb suffix {taH} instead of the separate verb {taH}. {‘e’} as a suffix does not belong on a verb, and if you meant to use the pronoun {‘e’} as a way of meaning “It continues that it emits a pleasurable odor,” the problem is that {taH} as a verb probably does not take a direct object. The definition “continue, go on, endure, survive” does not really suggest a direct object, and without that, {‘e’} has no grammatical function here. The “sentence as object” grammatical construction is very useful, but those new with the language tend to fall to it a bit prematurely to carry a very wide range of thought, much of which is better served with other constructions.

tIvamvaD <<rose>> wIpong ‘ach pong pIm wIpongchugh, pIw ‘ey He’taH.

This is perfectly serviceable as a translation, though it makes several cultural assumptions. Do we know for sure that Klingons actually LIKE the smell of a rose? If they did, one might expect to find a word for it in our vocabulary. For all we know, Klingons consider roses to be weeds, primarily desirable because their thorns improve the qualities of a good fence.

We could solve a couple of cultural issues here if we get back to the spirit of the original instead of the specific word choice:

SoSwI’ ‘IwchabvaD pong pIm vIwIvchugh, pIw ‘ey He’taH.

All of this is just one guy’s opinion, by the way. Just friendly suggestion. Take with grain of salt.

lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
Retired Door Repair Guy

> On Dec 4, 2014, at 11:29 AM, Lieven <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> I'm not going into grammatical detail, but that was very good, for a newbie.
> 
> Am 04.12.2014 um 17:11 schrieb Chelsea Knauf:
>> {'roS' wIpong, 'ej pong pIm wIpongchugh, pIw 'ey He''e' taH}.
>> 
>> Newbie try.  Hopefully somewhere close to correct.
> 
> -- 
> Lieven L. Litaer
> aka Quvar valer 'utlh
> http://www.facebook.com/Klingonteacher
> http://wiki.qepHom.de
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Tlhingan-hol mailing list
> Tlhingan-hol at kli.org
> http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol