Grammatical Comments
Comments made within this book are just that and belong solely to the author. They are non-cannon and should therefore be treated as such.
Marc Okrand states that there are many instances of Klingon words being both nouns and verbs (e.g., naD - commendation and naD - commend). As a non-cannon rule of thumb - especially if dealing with non-Klingons - ‘to-do’ verbs can be used more often than not as nouns (e.g., to abuse and abuse) and visa-versa. Another way of looking at it is, if a noun cannot be found but a verb describing the act can the verb will, even in
Federation, leave the sentence understandable/translatable.
Transliteration
Transliteration can be a valuable learning tool for helping language warriors come to grips with the phonetics of tlhIngan because they can practice writing words they are familiar with into tlhIngan Hol which he is not. To put it another way, one of the difficulties
with learning Klingon is down to the use of a familiar alphabet in a different way to usual. Not very different admittedly but different all the same. One could almost say they ‘clash’.
In some quarters, transliteration is actively discouraged. However it does have a legitimate place in tlhIngan Hol, as it does in all languages and cultures. Therefore if writing something in Klingon e.g., mentioning a place, it could be surmised that a Klingon might have only heard the name and would therefore automatically write it in his own
language i.e., transliterate it into Klingon.
There is of course a strong precedence for transliteration already in place: The word Klingon is after all a transliteration of tlhIngan. Furthermore Marc Okrand’s original work ‘The Klingon Dictionary’ has a whole section on the transliteration of names. In that section he sets up certain rules on how this has been done from tlhIngan
Hol into Federation Std: k = q; kl = tlh; kr = Q; lts/its = tlh; gr = gh etc. All any body has to do is to apply these rules in reverse.
However although I feel transliteration is OK it is only fair to the person you are writing to if you annotate the word so they don’t rip their hair out trying to look it up. The fairly standard way to do this is putting the word <inside> <these> <marks>. I don’t recommend the use of speech marks as that can get very confusing when mixed up with the tlhIngan glottal stop.
Pronunciation | Nouns
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