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TODAY’S VOCABULARY:
Suv is a verb meaning fight
Tags: Klingon
This might be a silly question, but I’ll ask anyway:
In a previous episode you said Klingon word order was OVS.
So I’m wondering if jabwI’jIHagh would be the correct way of saying “I laugh at the waiter”? [Isn’t the waiter the object of that sentence?]
01.10.11 at 2:09 pm
Whoops, I meant jabwI’ jIHagh. [with a space]
01.10.11 at 2:10 pm
Hey, M. I’ve taken the liberty of correcting a vowel for you, on the assumption you meant jIHagh (because *jeHagh doesn’t make any sense)
Your propose sentence doesn’t work, for several reasons.
First, the prefix jI- doesn’t take an object. As such, you won’t find it adorning any verb in a OVS sentence. That’s number one.
Second, Hagh means laugh, not laugh at, so even if you used the correct prefix (which I haven’t talked about yet), it still wouldn’t make sense to craft the sentence this way.
In Klingon you could say something like because of the waiter, I laugh which would be jabwI’mo’ jIHagh (and again, that’s using a suffix I haven’t talked about yet).
Or, depending on why you’re laughing at the waiter, you might pick a different word to describe what you’re doing, maybe something like I mock the waiter jabwI’ vIvaq (more prefixes and verbs you haven’t seen yet).
All of which brings up a very good rule to follow that I haven’t introduced yet: don’t try to translate things word for word, but focus instead on the underlying ideas. And when in doubt, recast the entire sentence.
01.10.11 at 4:20 pm
Thanks for the explanation. I knew it probably wasn’t correct 😛
01.12.11 at 5:00 pm
Hang in there. Eventually I will get around to talking about how we’ve more or less agreed to handle indirect objects in Klingon.
01.12.11 at 5:03 pm