Klingon/Lesson 2

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Simple sentences

Introduction

In every lesson you will learn a few new words and some grammar. In this lesson, you will learn how to form a few basic sentences.

Vocabulary

Klingon has only three parts of speech: nouns, verbs and other. Here are a few nouns and verbs.

loD	(noun)	man
be'	(noun)	woman
loDHom	(noun)	boy
be'Hom	(noun)	girl
jatlh	(verb)	say , speak or talk
ba'	(verb)	sit
Qam	(verb)	stand
yIt	(verb)	walk

Grammar

Articles

English has one definite article (the) and one indefinite article (a and its variant an). Klingon has no equivalents to these words.

Affixes

An affix is either a prefix or a suffix.

English uses affixes. For example, in English the prefix dis- is used to reverse the meaning of a verb, as in agree and disagree. Suffixes are used to form plurals, as in cat and cats.

Affixes are central to Klingon grammar and they will be introduced gradually.

Verb Prefixes

Only verbs have prefixes. A prefix indicates the subject and object that accompany a verb. They are sometimes called pronomial prefixes. There are 29 of them, and they will be introduced throughout the course. Here are the first four:

Prefix	Subject	Object
jI-	I	none
bI-	you (sing.)	none
Su-	you (plural)	none
ma-	we	none

Suffixes with an object will be introduced in a later lesson.

A prefix is added to the front of a verb to form a simple sentence:

	jIQam.	I stand.
	bIQam.	You stand. (referring to one person)
	SuQam.	You stand. (referring to more than one person)
	maQam.	We stand.

Punctuation: Some writers do not end single sentences of Klingon with the final period (.). This practice is common in The Klingon Dictionary. However it is normal practice when writing several sentences to end each with a period, as in English. I would recommend that all sentences in Klingon end with a period.

Verbs can be used without any prefix. The absence of a prefix can be translated in several ways, but the most common is where the subject is any one of he, she, it or they, and with no object.

So yIt, which is a verb meaning walk, on its own can form a sentence meaning He walks, She walks, or They walk, and so on. Of course, if there is a noun, it is used instead of the pronoun. We will see examples of this later.

Suffixes

Klingon also makes extensive use of suffixes, which are added to the end of verbs and nouns.

There are many different suffixes, but this lesson introduces just one, -be'. It is added to the end of a verb to negate it, so is often translated by not or do not.

jIyItbe'.

I am not walking.

Simple Sentences

In Klingon, the word order in a sentence is reversed from English. The subject comes after the verb instead of before it. The subject is the noun carrying out the action of the verb, so in Klingon it appears at the end of the sentence:

qet loD.

The man runs. or The man is running.

In this sentence, no prefix is required on the verb.

Exercises

Now, go and read the lesson again, memorize the new words and then try these easy exercises.

Conclusion

In this lesson, you learned some verb prefixes and a suffix. You learned a few new words of Klingon and how to string them together to form simple sentences.

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