Age is normally expressed as in the example {loSmaH ben jIboghpu'}, "I was born 40 years ago."
The English word "ago" tends to be always relative to the present. {ben} is glossed as "years ago" but is it necessarily relative to the present, or is it relative to the event being talked about?
Say we want to use age to express when something happens, as in {qaSpu' wanI'vam loSmaH ben jIboghpu'DI'}. Does it say "This event happened when I was 40 years old (when I had been born 40 years previously)" or "This event happened when I was born forty years ago." Switching the dependency of the clauses, {qaSpu'DI' wanI'vam loSmaH ben jIboghpu'}, seems to have the desired effect on {ben}: "When this event happened, I had been born 40 years ago (that is, I was 40)." But I can still conceive that it could be understood as "I was born 40 years ago when this event happened." Reversing the order of the clauses shouldn't have any effect in Klingon, but I would tend to interpret {loSmaH ben jIboghpu' qaSpu'DI' wanI'vam} as "I was born 40 years ago, when this event happened" instead of "I had been born 40 years previously when this event happened."
Are there relevant canon examples?
I think the ago in ben and Hu' are always
relative to the present of the speaker, but I have no evidence to
back this up aside from the ago in their given
translations. If you want to say something like ten years
before I was born, but you don't want to give away your age
and do the math yourself, you'll have to say something like jIboghpa'
qaSpu' wa'maH DIS; qaSpa' poHvam, blah blah blah...
This is really clumsy and I don't like it, but I can't think of a
better way to do it. I tried to come up with something about qaSpa'
boghpu'ghachwIj wa'maH DIS vorgh, but that doesn't sound
right to me.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name