[tlhIngan Hol] How many valid Klingon words are there?

De'vID de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com
Mon Aug 22 13:09:59 PDT 2022


Has anyone worked out how many valid Klingon words there are, in the sense
that they're words found in the dictionary or such words with legal
affixes?

There's only a handful of {chuvmey}, which we can thus ignore for an
approximation. The majority of "words" will be verbs, followed by nouns.
Suppose that there are V root verbs and N basic nouns (i.e., verbs and
nouns with no affixes). Then how many valid verbs and nouns are there?

We can even go further and get a finer-grained count by considering which
verbs can't take objects and thus can only have a subset of the prefixes
applied to them. But as a first approximation which has about the right
order of magnitude, assume all verbs can take all prefixes. (It's very
tricky to handle {-moH} otherwise.)

Don't forget about the rovers, and the suffixes {-wI'} and {-ghach} which
turn verbs into nouns.

Has anyone computed this? Someone asked me for a list of all valid Klingon
words, and I did some rough calculations and came up with a number, but I
wanted to see if anyone else had done the calculation to double-check my
result.

Context:
https://github.com/De7vID/klingon-assistant-data/issues/665

-- 
De'vID
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