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Hello, and welcome. You’re listening to DaHjaj Hol, your daily dose of Klingon language. I’m your host, Lawrence Schoen.
And here we are at midweek again. Time for something exciting. Today we’re going to look at a very special expression in Klingon which we’ll call the law’ / puS construction.
law’ and puS are two perfectly normal verbs.
law’, L, A, W, Apostrpohe, means be many.
puS, P, U, Capital S, means be few.
But they can be used together to make some comparisons and I’m going to show you how.
By now you’ve probably noticed that there seem to be two kinds of verbs in Klingon. Verbs which describe actions, and verbs that describe qualities. The law’ / puS construction works with verbs of quality, and allow us to talk about how one noun possesses more of a quality than another noun.
Imagine if you will two nouns, let’s call them A and B. And now imagine a quality, which we’ll call Q. Now let’s set up the construction like this:
A Q law’ B Q puS
A is more Q than B
I know that sounds very odd, but bear with me a moment and let’s plug in some nouns and verbs and I believe it will make more sense for you:
chom ghung law’ vavlI’ ghung puS
the bartender is hungrier than your father
romuluSngan ngIj law’ tlhIngan ngIj puS
the Romulan is rowdier than the Klingon
bolwI’ char law’ jabwI’ char puS
the drooler is more slimy than the waiter
Got it? Good.
To review, you take a couple nouns you want to compare. You take a verb of quality that you’ll compare them on. You dust off the verbs law’ and puSl, and then you run them all together: First noun, Quality, law’, Second noun, Quality again, puS. And that’s it. And while some languages may open some worlds better than others, the important thing to remember is that’s what languages do. qo’mey poSmoH Hol.
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Today’s podcast is brought to you by The Klingon Way, by Marc Okrand. |
Tags: Klingon