[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: wej

[lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com]

One One was a racehorse.

Two Two was one, too.

One One won one horse race.

Two Two won one, too.


Ere air be heir to e’er changing abuse, we should control our pollution.

My wife has a book entitled “Here lies…”, which when heard aloud sounds like, “Hear lies”, and the second word of both interpretations, while spelled and pronounced identically with identical inflection has different meaning and grammatical role.

Given the constant expansion of vocabulary and the interest in keeping words short, it’s amazing this doesn’t happen more often than it does. It is occasionally problematic, and comical at times, but most of the time context sets the expectation of what the other person is likely to say next so that the ambiguity is limited.

The main problem with Klingon is that since few of us speak it well enough to have actual conversations, or writings of length, we so often encounter Klingon communication WITHOUT context. Often, it’s written, without inflection. We have a snippet thrown at us and we are pressed to figure out what it’s supposed to mean. This is the main reason we get our nickers in a twist over the kind of ambiguity that we commonly live with in any other language.

Just the fax, M’am.

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

> On Apr 8, 2015, at 1:11 AM, Anthony Appleyard <a.appleyard at btinternet.com> wrote:
> 
> Or there is a tone difference. For example, in one dialect of Norwegian, a noun pronounced {bønnǝr} means "peasants" or "beans" according to the tone used when saying it.
> 
> ----Original message----
> From : sustel at trimboli.name
> Date : 07/04/2015 - 19:42 (GMTST)
> To : tlhingan-hol at kli.org
> Subject : Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: wej
> 
> ...
> Okrand even mentions sound length in KGT where he uses the example word 
> {qettaH}, ...
> 
> So who knows? Maybe {wej} "not yet" really is pronounced {weej}. Or 
> maybe not. That's the trouble with having only fictional native 
> speakers. However, the phenomenon is quite real, however it may 
> manifest. We just can't examine it.
> 
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