[87407] in tlhIngan-Hol
RE: Klingon Draydels
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Boozer)
Wed Dec 2 11:56:16 2009
From: Steven Boozer <sboozer@uchicago.edu>
To: "'tlhingan-hol@kli.org'" <tlhingan-hol@kli.org>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 10:53:16 -0600
In-Reply-To: <4b1690c8.5444f10a.095e.012e@mx.google.com>
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
naHQun:
>Last night, my wife and in-laws were spinning draydels and I got to
>thinking.
>While Scrabble and Boggle require knowledge of tlhIngan Hol to play (and
>in the case of the sets we used, the ability to read pIqaD), the
>draydels, despite being labeled in Hebrew, don't require you to
>understand Hebrew.
>So if I were to label a draydel in pIqaD, they'd still be able to play.
>Now before I get started, has anyone done this yet?
AFAIK no one has. For those unfamiliar with draydels, see the WikiPedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draydel ). From the article:
The Yiddish word "dreydl" comes from the word "dreyen" ("to turn").
The Hebrew word "sevivon" comes also from the root "SBB" ("to turn")
and was invented by Itamar Ben-Avi (the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda)
when he was 5 years old.
So you could call it a *{tlhe'wI'} from {tlhe'} "turn", but I think *{DIngwI'} "spinner" works much better, which works for any sort of spinning top or toy.
Each side of the dreidel bears a letter of the Hebrew alphabet:
ð (Nun), â (Gimel), ä (Hei), ù (Shin), which together form the
acronym for "ðñ âãåì äéä ùí" (*Nes Gadol Haya Sham* – "a great
miracle happened there"). These letters also form a mnemonic for
the rules of a gambling game played with a dreidel: Nun stands
for the Yiddish word *nite* ("nothing"), Hei stands for *halb*
("half"), Gimel for *gants* ("all"), and Shin for *shteln* ("put").
Fortunately we have words for all four of the Yiddish words:
pagh "nothing"
bID "half"
Hoch "all"
lan "place, put"
The trick will be coming up with a matching four-word Klingon equivalent for the phrase "a great miracle happened there". The first word is easy: {pa'} "there".
--
Voragh
Canon Master of the Klingons
