[tlhIngan Hol] {je} "too" with doubly {-bogh}'ed nouns

[Will Martin]

Okay, here’s a better way to convey what I mean:

I used to date a woman named Marni. She volunteered for the Peace Corps in Malaysia. When she told the natives her name, they laughed because it sounds a lot like “manis”, which is their word for “sweet”. They called her “manis manis”, because in Bahasa (the word the Malaysians use both for their language and for language in general), they repeat adjectives in order to express the concept of “very”. “Very sweet” is “manis manis”. They thought she was very sweet.

So, as a student of Bahasa, you could wonder if even sweeter would be “manis manis manis”.

And if that works, how about “manis manis manis manis”

And how about "manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis manis"?

When does it break and become something that no Malaysian would ever say?

And if that’s where you are naturally inclined to go, are you really trying to learn how to speak Bahasa? 

The effort you are putting into this could be far more effective toward the goal of speaking this new (for you) language well if exerted to simply say a broader scope of other things in the language and check in to see if your multiple paragraphs expressing something in Klingon succeed in conveying the ideas that you were trying to express.

For myself, this is hard to do because this forum is open to a group of people most of whom are unknown to me, and whenever I try to think of something I want to say to this anonymous crowd, I’m stopped either by a lack of rich vocabulary in the area I randomly come up with, and/or I fail to come up with something to say that might be remotely interesting to the general public.

Most of the ideas I have in a common day are of no interest to anyone I know.

Simple example?

I just read a note Wilbur Wright wrote during the 1903 experiments in powered flight saying that they figured out that the center of gravity of the Wright Flyer with a man in the pilot’s position was about 24” back from the leading edge of the wing. Next to this, in the book I found this quote is a photograph showing one of the brothers in flying position, and it’s clear that the cord of the wing (the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge) is less than the height of the reclining pilot, likely 4’-5’. Let’s choose 5’ because it minimizes what I’m about to measure.

Wings generally have a center of lift 25% of the cord back from the leading edge of the wing. A wing with a 5’ cord has a center of lift around 20” back from the leading edge.

That means that on the Wright Flyer, the center of lift is in front of the center of gravity.

That means that the Wright Flyer is tail heavy.

Since the canards (the “elevators”, or as they called it the “horizontal rudders”) are in front of the wings, that means that they were holding the nose of the airplane DOWN, not UP.

Modern canard aircraft never do this because it is inherently unstable — it has no Pitch Stability, and will always, at every second, require pilot intervention to maintain a constant pitch and airspeed.

But that’s not the worst of it.

The Wright Brothers used circular arcs for the ribs of both the wings and the canards, and the concave face of both of these are oriented downwards.

That means that the canards are mounted upside down for their role in pitch control. It would be like trying to fly with the wings convex face upward.

And that means that the canards were always stalled. The bottom, concave surface of the canards were consistently engulfed in turbulence with no laminar flow. The quantity of turbulence would be very dynamic, increasing and decreasing to a remarkable degree depending on slight updrafts, downdrafts, or even minor adjustments in angle-of-attack by the pilot, which were already exaggerated because the canards hinged on an axis at their center, instead of near the leading edge. 

All this explains why the one video they made in flight with a movie camera shows the nose in a constant state of randomly yanking upwards and downwards to varying degrees and frequencies several times a second.

It had to have been terrifying to pilot that aircraft.

Add that this puts a big, centered source of drag in front of the wings. This would amplify any yaw effects during flight.

In other words, they had big problems with adverse yaw, which modern pilots would only partially understand. All pilots know that when you bank for a left turn, the increased lift on the right wing also creates increased drag on the right wing, so while the path of the airplane curves toward the left, the nose of the airplane shifts to the right, unless you correct for this “coordinating” the turn with the rudder. Modern pilots look at the Wright Flyer and notice that until 1911, the Wright Brothers never came up with independent control over the rudder. They just tied it into the linkage for the roll control, which will never work perfectly (though it works well enough for the Ercoupe, or some models of Bonanza).

What modern pilots don’t recognize is that when adverse yaw pitched the nose to the right on a left bank, it also moved the stalled canards off to the right, pulling the nose even FARTHER and HARDER to the right, counteracting whatever the rudder was trying to do.

That means the Wright Brothers were even MORE impressive as pilots, constantly fighting the Flyer’s natural inclination to yaw into a slip severe enough to crash, or yank itself into a stall or a dive. They did crash a lot of times, though it’s impressive that they flew as far as they did between crashes and crashed gently enough to survive with a repairable subset of the “machine” surviving to rebuild it and fly it again.

None of these ideas are explored in this, or any other book I’ve found on the Wright Brothers, and I’ve read quite a few of them.

See?

1. That would be really hard to write in Klingon.

2. Nobody here wants to read that in any language. In fact, so far as I know, nobody ANYWHERE wants to read this. I just sit here and think it, compulsively.

And no, I’m not an aeronautical engineer or even a pilot. I was a student glider pilot years ago, landing an unpowered aircraft nine times, a little over two hours total in the air. I’m an amateur crackpot with no credentials for thinking anything meaningful about the Wright Flyer.

And this is just one of many useless areas of interest, including the Klingon language, which is as inexplicable as anything else in terms of why I think about it.

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




> On Jun 2, 2022, at 10:04 AM, D qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> fergusq:
> > They are both grammatically correct. 
> > I believe what you are asking is does
> > Klingon have ellipsis. If we want an
> > adverbial to apply to the sentences, can
> > we drop it from the other?
> 
> Yes, this is what I was wondering about.
> 
> fergusq:
> > However, je is a bit special, so I'm not
> > sure how ellipsis works with it. It might
> > be clearer to repeat it.
> 
> I believe so too; now that I'm rethinking this, I think the "safest" choice would be to repeat the {je} twice.
> 
> -- 
> Dana'an
> https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/ <https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/>
> Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20220602/de659c9f/attachment-0016.htm>