Back from the qepHom

[pne]

So, I’m back from the qepHom in Saarbrücken and coping with my PqS (Post-qepHom Syndrome)—I probably won’t get to see those friends of mine again for a year, nor have that atmosphere and the opportunities to practice. (And unlike Esperanto, I can’t just join the local group to get speaking practice; the closest speaker to me that I know of is probably Sabrina in Dortmund, and it was her first qepHom at that so her vocabulary is tiny. For some reasons, even the “cultural” Klingons—who do the whole ship thing but don’t necessarily care about the language—are thinly spread in the north of Germany.)

At work, I was asked to “Say something in Klingon!” Normally, I would struggle to think of something appropriate to say, but not this time: after all, we had all been asked to memorise the six sentences of the nentay!

So I tried to recall them from memory and recited them (with the translation into German afterwards, upon request). I got five (not necessarily in the correct order) and knew one was missing but didn’t remember which one. I remembered on the way back to my desk; amusingly, it was the same one that Shani had forgotten when she had to recite them for the jury.

Comments

[pauamma]

I take it no painsticks are involved? (I'm unclear about the differences between 1st and 2nd RoA)

[pne]

(I'm unclear about the differences between 1st and 2nd RoA)

As am I; I know very little about the Star Trek universe (which makes me quite an anomaly among the players: nearly everyone approaches the language through the background of liking Star Trek in general and Klingons in particular, and typically know quite a bit of the universe).

As I understood from the weekend, the two are very similar (if not identical) and the second one is more a repeat of the first (like renewing one’s wedding vows some years later?).

I take it no painsticks are involved?

Not this weekend, no. Nor two entire rows of warriors wielding (or not wielding) them.

When it was time to demonstrate whether people had learned them, they could walk between two participants (one on either side) with bat'leths with which they would touch or gently jab the “celebrant”. The celebrant could then choose to pretend to feel pain.

Each celebrant got point by a jury consisting of the four team leaders: up to six points for knowing the sentences; a bonus point for doing them in Klingon; and a couple of points each for Klingon pronunciation and for delivery (so if you just recited the sentences, no bonus points, but if you let the two others jab you with bat'leths and groaned and panted and fell to your knees, you could get a couple of extra points for your acting). The team with the most points would then win.

(Well, there were one or two other things that gave teams points, but one of them—memorising six words and later recalling at least four of them when prompted with the German translation—everyone passed, so that didn’t give any group an advantage, and the nentay phrases had the largest influence since you could score up to 11 points.)

In the end, Team Black won. (Partly because all team members chose to recite their nentay phrases; the other teams all had one or more who were not present or preferred not to speak Klingon in front of an audience.) But we all got the same mugs in the end :) First and second prize simply had some gift wrap around them and some sweets.

I was team lead of Team White. (The others were Team SuD [blue–green–yellow] and Team Doq [red–orange–brown].)

Four teams because Klingons have four basic colours :)

The four team leaders were the four participants with arguable the highest level of Klingon skill, and they drew team members by lot (picking slips of paper from a container).

This way, each team would have at least one somewhat-skilled speaker, and no team would be all-skilled or all-unskilled. (And it split up two of the people who would otherwise have preferred to be together, thus benefitting two teams with their knowledge, both of Klingon and of the ceremony, since both had been active in the Klingon fan club for years and had witnessed [and, I think, often coached] many, many Rites of Ascension in their day.)

[pauamma]

Interesting. (I'm not sure what constitutes canon, but IIRC, one ST novel has differences between human and Klingon visible spectrum as a minor plot device, and the Klingon-visible range includes some UV (categorized as 2 distinct colors) but no red.)

[pne]

Interesting indeed!

The Klingon Dictionary glosses Doq as be orange, red (v).

It would be interesting to know whether or how the UV-but-no-red bit is compatible with that (did the book authors goof? did Marc Okrand goof when creating the language? can Klingons see violet and UV and we simply don't know the Klingon word for it yet because it hasn’t been needed so far? etc.).

Interestingly, there’s no canon word for “purple” (SuD ends at blue) and Klingon for the Galactic Traveler has this to say about that:

The fact that neither SuD nor Doq includes what is called “violet” or “purple” in Federation Standard may be related to Klingon physiology—that is, exactly how the Klingon eye processes different wavelengths of light.

A bit further up, KGT also says that besides the words for “white” and “black”, there are only two terms used: SuD (“be blue, green, yellow”) and Doq (“be red, orange”). Which sounds fairly definitive, rather than “only two terms are known” or the like.

Slightly less canon, though, there’s the EuroTalk TalkNow! CD, which teaches the same words in all of its languages and therefore includes a word for “purple” even in Klingon. But many of the terms there are speculative and are more descriptions than translations: what a Klingon might use to refer to a Terran object or concept if they had to put it into words.

For what it’s worth, though, “purple” is called Doq 'ej SuD “be blue–green–yellow and orange–red” on that CD.

[pauamma]

Dug up a bit more and I'm nearly certain the novel is Pawns and Symbols. (But I don't have my copy handy, so I can't say what the colors were called.)

[pauamma]

Found a text copy online, and the 2 color names in the UV range are given as "amarklor" and "kalish", which don't look like Klingon words to me. (But then, 2 Klingons characters in that book are called Aernath and Aethelnor, which strike me as more Saxon/OE-like than anything else.)

[pne]

the 2 color names in the UV range are given as "amarklor" and "kalish", which don't look like Klingon words to me.

They're certainly not standard Okrandian orthography, but then, many of the names aren't ("K'mpek" etc. and all the random a'postrophe's in the names). If you squint, those words could be 'amaQlor and qalIS (or qeylIS), respectively, which are reasonable Klingon words. (Though qeylIS is already used for Kahless, the Unforgettable.)

(But then, 2 Klingons characters in that book are called Aernath and Aethelnor, which strike me as more Saxon/OE-like than anything else.)

My first impulse was to call them Elvish names, but that's probably got more to do with where Tolkien got his linguistic inspiration from. And Elves are kind of the Anti-Klingons! How odd of the author to have chosen such names.

[pauamma]

Belatedly, this sounds like Klingon treats adjectives and stative verbs the same.

[pne]

That’s entirely correct; there’s no word class “adjective” in Klingon grammar, and you use stative verbs for what English uses adjectives.

(There are, in fact, only three word classes in traditional Klingon grammar: nouns, verbs, and “everything else”; “particles” be a reasonable translation, and it includes such things as adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, and numbers. Interestingly enough, there’s no way to turn an adjective into an adverb or vice versa, so there are gaps such as “fast” only being an adverb and “the fast ship” has to be translates as something like “the ship which travels fast”.)

Word order makes the predicative/attributive sense clear: yoH SuvwI' “the warrior is brave” (sentence) vs. SuvwI' yoH “the brave warrior” (noun phrase). (yoH “be brave”; SuvwI' “warrior”, word order is object–verb–subject; “adjectives” follow the noun they modify.)

I was just wondering whether this could lead to ambiguity in case the object of a verb (which comes before the verb) has an adjective attached to it, but I think not, since Klingon stative verbs can’t have objects, so they can’t be the predicate of the sentence given that there’s not subject following, so they have to be the attribute.