[tlhIngan Hol] mu' chu' chabal tetlh!

Ed Bailey bellerophon.modeler at gmail.com
Wed Mar 22 18:56:41 PDT 2017


On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 8:29 PM, Felix Malmenbeck <felixm at kth.se> wrote:

>
> - talk about, discuss (verb)
>
>
> Example sentences:
>
> (1) "I enjoy talking about Klingon."
>
> (2) "We spoke about the fact that bicycles are evil."
>
> (3) "What are y'all talking about?"
>
> (4) "I visited the restaurant that you told me about."
>
> (5) "Why is our CO so unwilling to talk about the space station that our
> enemies destroyed?"
>
> (6) "She refuses to talk about the project she's working on."
>
> (7) "That blowhard talks about himself too much."
>
> (8) "Those lovers talk about each other too much."
>
I'm not suggesting these are the ideal (or necessarily even acceptable) way
to express your sentences, but lately I've been considering how sentences
could be made more concise with the topic marker {-'e'}, which seems
underused (by humans, anyway). For many situations, it seems like a shorter
alternative to tacking {bopbogh...} onto the object of consideration. So
can you indicate the topic of conversation this way before an intransitive
verb of speech? How do these sentences strike you?

(1) tlhIngan Hol'e' jIjatlh 'e' vItIv.
(2) mIgh qam Do Dujmey. ngoDvam'e' majatlh.
(3) nuq'e' SujatlhtaH?
(4) Qe'e' choja'ta'bogh vISuchta'.
(5) qatlh tengchaH'e' luSangta'bogh jaghpu'ma' jatlhqangbe'qu' ra'wI'ma'?
(6) jInmol'e' turtaHbogh mujatlhQo'.
(7) tlhoy bop'egh 'eDjenvetlh jatlhtaHvIS.
(8) tlhoy bopchuq parmaqqayvetlh jatlhtaHvIS.

For the last two, due to their reflexive nature, I couldn't see how to use
the topic marker without repeating {'eDjen} or {parmaqqay} (though just
because of my English sense of style: I seem to recall from TKD something
to the effect that such repetition isn't bad style in Klingon). It seems to
me that {bop} <be about, be concerned with> can take a person as its
subject as well as the usual {bom}, {lut}, etc. If not, I'd cheerfully
change {bop} to {buS} or {qIm} or somesuch.

~mIp'av
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