[86895] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Klingon Sentence Structure
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tracy Canfield)
Sat Nov 21 13:31:30 2009
In-Reply-To: <573207640.6679701258826248441.JavaMail.root@sz0171a.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net>
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:23:36 -0500
From: Tracy Canfield <toastrix@gmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
First identify the verb - the action in the sentence. That's "visited".
Now identify the subject - the people (or things) doing the visiting.
"You and I"
Finally, the object is what gets visited. "Earth."
So the basic word order is going to be something like
Earth - visited - you and I
"Earth" is easy; it's tera'.
"You and I" is a little trickier because it's a compound noun phrase.
(Though you could just say "we", maH.) Klingon has two different
words for "you" depending on whether you're talking to one or two
people, a distinction English doesn't bother with. If it's just one
person, it's SoH. If it's more than one, it's tlhIH.
you - SoH
I - jIH
When you're putting two nouns together, the connecting word goes after them.
you and I - SoH jIH je
The last thing is the word "visit". Assuming you can use it to visit
a place and not just a person, and I'm sure someone will tell me if I
can't use it with the name of a place, it's Such.
We have to do two things to get Such in the right form. First, it has
to agree with the subject and the object - in other words, we have to
put a prefix on the verb that matches the subject and the object. In
the verb prefix chart, we pick the prefix for the subject "we" that
goes with the object "it" - wI-.
Finally, since the visit is completed, we need an aspect suffix -
something that tells whether an action is completed, in progress, or
neither. The marker for a completed action is -pu'.
visited - wISuchpu'
Put them all together and you get
tera' wISuchpu' jIH SoH je
2009/11/21 <clpachucki@comcast.net>:
>
> I got my Klingon Dictionary and I have been trying to figure out how to write a grammatically correct Klingon sentence. I haven't been able to figure it out. Can someone help me (in English please)?
>
> Sample sentence: You and I visited Earth.
>
>
> n00b
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
