[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: 'Imyagh

[Will Martin]

{ghugh} works for me.

And just to clarify for anyone not altogether familiar with quotation, in Klingon the mechanism we have been given for quotation suggests that quotations are always “direct” as opposed to indirect (unless there’s a mechanism for that which has not yet been revealed), and the direct quote is grammatically independent of the sentence with the verb of speech in it. They are adjacent to each other, and it doesn’t matter which comes first. You can think of it like a looser variation of an “SAO” (Sentence As Object), except there is no pronoun representing the quotation, and it has no grammatical connection to the speech sentence whatsoever.

Imagine English saying: My sister scolded me. “Come in out of the rain, you idiot.”

Or

“Come in out of the rain, you idiot.” My sister scolded me.

Since there is no official punctuation for written Klingon, since the Romanized alphabet we use is merely a phonetic representation of spoken Klingon, and piQaD writing of non-Greeked text is fan-based, and acknowledged enough to put on Skybox cards, but not enough for Viacom to come out and admit that there is a right way to do it, and they pay Okrand, so he’s not going to step out of that box, we don’t have punctuation guidelines. We make that up, ourselves, and we lack the authority to make anything official.

So, if you want to put a comma between what is grammatically two separate sentences, that’s probably okay. Others might use a period, instead. Maybe a semicolon would do. Many use << and >> as quotation marks, since actual quotation marks are easy to confuse with glottal stops. The devil is in the details.

Basically, we use punctuation with Romanized letters and ligatures just to be clearer about what we are conveying.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.



> On Feb 14, 2019, at 1:37 AM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2019 at 19:10, Felix Malmenbeck <felixm at kth.se <mailto:felixm at kth.se>> wrote:
> > (qurgh, 7/29/2017):  The cat said, "meow".  Marc said yes.  The cat meowed as I walked by. Marc said no. 
> 
> The original definition of {ghugh} is on the page "Other 3", and {'Imyagh} is on the page "Other 4":
> https://www.kli.org/activities/qepmey/qepa-chamah-losdich/qepa-chamah-losdich-new-words/ <https://www.kli.org/activities/qepmey/qepa-chamah-losdich/qepa-chamah-losdich-new-words/>
>  
> 
> This raises the question of how one should translate "The cat said".
> 
> Would you say
> 
> ghugh vIghro', 'Imyagh.
> or
> jatlh vIghro', 'Imyagh.
> or perhaps
> ghugh vIghro', jatlh, 'Imyagh.
> ?
> 
> Ignoring the page break between them, the way they're defined together suggests to me that you say {'Imyagh ghugh vIghro'} (or maybe {ghugh vIghro', 'Imyagh}).
> 
> {ghugh} vocalize (v) (referring to sound emitted by an animal, but not speech)
> {'Imyagh} is the conventional way to express the sound made by a {vIghro'} or a {ghISnar}, for example.
> 
> Considering the speech/non-speech distinction in Klingon grammar, I'd be inclined to limit {jatlh} to speech, i.e., exclude it from use for animal sounds.
> 
> -- 
> De'vID
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