On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 7:53 AM, mayqel qunenoS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:

If I had the entire klingon canon in electronic form, then I could do the search myself.

It can be awkward that there's no single canon database, but there's still resources for it: - http://klingonska.org/canon/ has everything up till around 2012, it's searchable and if you have a copy of TKD on hand you can read the transcripts of the published books. It's probably the closest thing to what you want, except for missing the last five years. - https://www.qephom.de/e/message_from_maltz.html has messages to Lieven. It's not searchable (well, you can try a site-specific google search) but it's brief enough to skim through. - boQwI' has canon for many words, if you have an Android phone or feel like installing it on Chrome. http://www.klingonwiki.net/ also has some canon resources, especially links to qep'a' words, movie dialogue, and the like. - If you keep your messages from KLI in an email folder, you can search that, since most canon ends up here. It can be helpful to just browse through the canon, like rereading qep'a' notes or the info on klingonska.org, not to look up a specific word but just to read what's there. After a while, you'll start to get a feel for which sources have canon for which words, and also get a feel for which words don't have canon associated with them.

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 10:58 AM, nIqolay Q <niqolay0@gmail.com> wrote:

After a while, you'll start to get a feel for which sources have canon for which words, and also get a feel for which words don't have canon associated with them.

As an addendum, eventually you'll get a feel for which words don't really need you to look up the canon in the first place. {veb} and {vorgh}, for instance, are relatively mundane stative verbs with simple English glosses. Even if they did have canon sentences, those canon sentences are probably going to look just like you expect. Also, it's important not to worry too much about canon. I don't mean you should ignore grammar and use words however you want and the like. It's important to know the rules. But many words have never been used in a sentence, or have never had their precise meanings elaborated on, or are only known from an ambiguous gloss in TKD, or have been used inconsistently. You will eventually encounter areas of vocabulary and syntax where the old pros and canon knowers don't know anything more than you or I do. If you obsess over making sure everything is 100% perfectly canonical, you're just going to burn yourself out when you try to handle the things we don't know precisely. In the end, sometimes you just have to take a guess on a word. The worst thing that can happen is a couple dozen strangers on the Internet think you goofed up.

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 11:56 AM, mayqel qunenoS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:

bIlugh nIqolay Q.

However, there is a reason which led to this thread in the first place.

In the past, when I was writing in klingon, I used to do something like this:

{ghu' veb vIQIjmeH QInvam vIghItlh} In order to explain the next situation, I'm writing this message.

And by saying "next situation", I meant the situation which I was about to explain in the next paragraph.

Until one day ghunchu'wI' wrote, that both {veb} and {vorgh} are meant to be used only with regards to items which exist in a row/list/succession. So, without a "previous situation", I can't write "next situation".

Because of this reason, I wanted to read the canon examples, in order to confirm this.

There's no canon explicitly related to this particular issue specifically. But knowing that {veb} and {vorgh} refer to lists, series, and things in succession can help understand where ghunchu'wI' is coming from. In the phrase "the next situation", the implied series is not a series of situations -- you aren't going through a list of situations and discussing them one by one. Rather, the implied series is the list of topics discussed in the text, and "next" refers to the next topic, which happens to be a situation. In this case, using {veb} to mean "be discussed next in this text" is a shortcut based on the English usage, and avoiding unnecessary Englishisms is considered good practice. There's no word for "topic" or "paragraph" or "be discussed next in this text" yet, though I think you can get the same basic idea with something like {ghu''e' Delbogh mu'tlheghmey veb} "situation that the next sentences describe". (Since a message is implicitly a series of sentences, I think using {veb} would be uncontroversial here, or at least less so than using it with {ghu'}.) Something like {tugh ghu' vIDelbogh} "situation that I will describe soon" might also work, although this does get into the issue of whether timestamps can be used metaphorically to refer to the timeline of reading through a text. Actually, I have a couple questions about concepts of time and succession as they relate to written texts... guess I should write a {chabal tetlh} for the next qep'a'.

nIqolay Q:

{ghu''e' luDelbogh mu'tlheghmey veb}

oh yeah, this is good ! this is borg perfection ! I'm gonna use this like there's no tomorrow ! qunnoq On Aug 25, 2017 7:49 PM, "nIqolay Q" <niqolay0@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 12:45 PM, nIqolay Q <niqolay0@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I think you can get the same basic idea with something like {ghu''e' Delbogh mu'tlheghmey veb} "situation that the next sentences describe".

You can get the same basic idea across even better by remembering your pronomial prefixes: the verb should of course be {luDelbogh}.

_______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org