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- Topic: Klingon >
- "mara yajbe' torgh."
18 Comments
the 2nd thing I learn after starting Klingon is that things don't come before other things like english. this is the draw back to duolingo. teach me the rule before you tell me I'm wrong.
Duolingo really should take you directly to the Tips & Notes at least the first time you do a Skill. I would actually prefer that they always take you to the Tips & Notes and then have a Start button at both the top and the bottom. Then one could choose not to read them, but everyone would get the chance and no one could say they didn't know that the Tips & Notes were there.
Agreed. I'm a native German and in Germany nouns are written with a capital letter. But here I can type everything in small letters and it's ok. In addition to that DL doesn't seem to care about punctuation. Comma, question mark... those things don't seem to bother DL either, but it is important.
Capital/lowercase matters in Klingon. q is not Q, and vice versa. There are other letters like this, too.
q is not Q, and vice versa. There are other letters like this, too.
q/Q is the only pair where both the capital and the lower-case letter exist in Klingon.
All other letters are always uppercase or always lowercase.
(Note that gh and tlh count as one letter in Klingon; there is no h on its own, so I wouldn't count this as a h/H pair.)
When looking at the written language, it can seem like that sometimes, but please don't develop that habit. When spoken it is read from left to right and you have to get used to hearing and saying the object first and the subject last. Also only some parts are in the reversed order - not all parts are. If the sentence were instead, yajbe' mara torgh je, we would keep the names in the same order and notice the conjunction moves, too: "Mara and Torg do not understand." Have you read the Tips (they exist on all the skills, but you have to use a web browser to read the Tips)?
So i suppose another way of looking at the structure would be blan is done by or affects blank. (Mara yajbe' Torgh = Mara is not understood by Torgh).
Sometimes that works, though sometimes it's hard to find a way to make that work and, of course, the eventual goal is to let go of the English translation altogether and just hear the Klingon meaning.
That can work for transitive verbs (that can take a direct object and form the passive voice), but e.g. Sop mara cannot turn into “was eaten by Mara” or anything like that — only “Mara ate.” makes sense.
And then you might as well translate qagh Sop mara as “Mara ate gagh” rather than as “Gagh was eaten by Mara”.
it doesn't accept doesn't!!!!!!!!! duolingo should fix this with other phrases shortened by apostrophes
The software is supposed to automatically accept the contraction, but I have explicitly added it, now, just to be sure. Is it possible there was some other error in your sentence? Did you take a screen shot?
Because Klingon writing doesn't have case.
A t is always a t and a D is always a D: there are no letters such as T or d in Klingon. q and Q are separate letters.
So it's a little like asking why the first digit of a number isn't capitalised when the number comes at the start of a sentence -- we don't have uppercase and lowercase numbers, and Klingon doesn't have uppercase and lowercase letters. Each Klingon letter just has one case, just like English numerals.
Instead of having to learn 52 letter shapes (as in English), you only have to learn 26 -- half the trouble :)
a b ch D e gh H I j l m n ng o p q Q r S t tlh u v w y '
Why did Torgh get corrected to Torg when the phrase uses Torgh????? >:((((
You're expected to translate Klingon into English -- yajbe' into "does not understand" and torgh into "Torg". That's his English name. (Well, "Federation Standard".)
what does torgh yajbe mara mean?
Nothing.
But if you add the missing apostrophe to torgh yajbe' mara, it means "Mara does not understand Torg" (or "Mara will not understand Torg" or "Mara did not understand Torg" -- the tense is not specified in the Klingon sentence).
