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

[Chelsea Knauf]

I appreciate it!  Thanks for taking the time to explain.

On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 11:30 AM, <lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
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>
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