[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon language known issues

[lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh]

As I believe ghunchu’wI’ suggested, you can express the irrealis via clever use of negatives, like, “If you were a Klingon, you would be bold,” becomes {tlhIngan SoHbe’, vaj bIjaqbe’}.

Usually there is a work-around, as with translating between any language. I came up with my own simple fix for the lack of the question word “which”, as in “Which weapon do you want?” by letting go of the requirement that it has to be a question when translated: {nuHlIj yIwIv!}

The primary issue for myself, when I consider writing in Klingon is the small vocabulary, compared to the vast English vocabulary. It is easy to have something that I’d like to say, but I become tortured when I lack vocabulary for the things or actions that I want to convey. Klingon is very expressive, but it’s not mature. We have a lot of words. My dictionary shows 2,768 words, though some of those are derivatives of other words, and the affixes expand that vocabulary substantially, but common English vocabulary has many tens of thousands of words, often exceeding 100,000 words.

There are favorite nits to pick, like the absence of a verb for “be fast” or “be slow”. Yes, we have adverbials to apply these concepts to verbs of action, but that gives us awkward workaround for talking about a fast ship or a slow commander, and it wrecks attempts at comparative constructions relating to something being faster or slower than anything else, requiring use refer to velocities being bigger or smaller.

When you consider that a substantial fraction of Klingon words are for things that don’t exist in the real lives of 21st century people, it gets hard to try to convey story-length communication in Klingon without wishing you had words for things you don’t have words for.

Yes, you can work around this by describing things instead of naming them, but the required cleverness and creativity can become very time consuming, stressful, and even torturous. Then again, if you really are into Klingon culture, maybe a little torture is not a bad thing.

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



> On Oct 19, 2015, at 10:26 AM, Lieven <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> Am 19.10.2015 um 15:42 schrieb qunnoQ HoD:
>> I've been meaning to ask..
>> tenses,lack of a passive voice etc ? Vocabulary aside,are there in
>> Klingon grammar deficiencies which would make the translation of an
>> english text into Klingon impossible ?
> 
> First that comes to my mind is the "irrealis": There is no way to make a difference between "If you are a Klingon" and "if you were a klingon".
> 
> But Okrand is knows about that and is working on it.
> 
> I'll let others add their problems and wishes, but like to point out that you can say almost everything in klingon, and that any missing possibility does not make the language less useful. The more klingon you learn, the more you will see that you do not need those "missing components".
> Hell yeah, they've translated Hamlet!
> 
> -- 
> Lieven L. Litaer
> aka Quvar valer 'utlh
> Grammarian of the KLI
> http://www.facebook.com/Klingonteacher
> http://www.klingonwiki.net
> 
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