[tlhIngan Hol] vagh tup neH ret

[Will Martin]

I’d just like to point out that {vagh tup ret vIghro’ vIlegh} conveys pretty much the same meaning, without the angst.

I only comment given the advice that “A Klingon may be inaccurate, but he is never approximate.” I’m reading into that the sense that Klingons typically stick to the facts with less of a tendency to want to elaborate unnecessarily.

Why do we care if it’s “only” five minutes ago? So long as we know it’s five minutes ago, we know what we need to know. As humans, we tend to want to both give the facts and comment on them in a frilly kind of way that annoys many Klingons.

So, there is nothing wrong with adding {neH} as you have. I’m merely suggesting that perhaps one might culturally consider it annoyingly superfluous. It’s not grammatically incorrect. It just might stray slightly from best practices, if Klingon were to have an equivalent of Strunk & White’s style guide for English.

The suffixes give us clues as to what kind of commentary on a statement that Klingons trend toward providing. English favors “helper words”, instead, so adding something like {neH} feels natural for us, and Klingons certainly do it, though they probably don’t do it as often as we do, saving it for settings where it marks an exception to what one might expect without the use of the extra word.

If it felt like a “short five minutes”, then I’d expect a Klingon to say it was four minutes ago. Or three. Accuracy is less important than having the information itself convey your meaning, instead of giving your emotional commentary on what kind of five minutes ago you saw the cat. It was an “only” five minutes, instead of a “not-only” five minutes. Really?

Making the comment might mark you as being overly sensitive to the quality of your experience of the passage of time. Like you are letting us know that you were sufficiently entertained during this particular five minutes so that it wasn’t as boring as a normal five minutes would be? Like we care about this, because…?

Just an opinion. Not cannon. Not based on any kind of authority. Just a comment.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Aug 20, 2019, at 8:25 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I wonder..
> 
> vagh tup neH ret vIghro' vIlegh 
> 
> Is this correct, and if yes what would it mean ?
> 
> only five minutes ago, I saw the cat ?
> or
> just five minutes ago, I saw the cat ?
> or 
> both ?
> 
> or is it just senseless ?
> 
> ~ cbcbcbb
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