chuvmey

A few months back several KLI members had eagerly provided assistance to Mark Mandel of Dragon Systems for the voice recognition work on the recent Star Trek: Klingon CD-ROM. Mark sent each of us a "thank you" note, written in English, romanized Klingon, and pIqaD. Before mailing it though he was able to get Marc Okrand to evaluate some new vocabulary. Their exchange appears below:

Mark Mandel I'm setting up some Dragon letterhead for thank-you letters to all my volunteer speakers. I'm replacing the standard text with Klingon in the KLIpIqaDmey uppercase font, the usable one that the KLI uses, and running TKD transliteration and English along the bottom. I'm pretty confident of my grammar and vocab., but if this is to smack in any way of officialness I'd like to be sure.

phone rI'mI' fax navHablI'

Since we have several fax numbers, and the general-purpose one comes out at the front desk in the other building, I always give out the number of the nearest machine for faxes to me. So:

general fax Hoch navHablI' [at front desk]

(as opposed to tlhIngan Hol navHablI', near me) leaning on the construction A Q law' Hoch Q puS, which takes Hoch not as literal 'all' but as a generalization, sort of 'all except for what I'm specifying to the contrary.'

[Which produced the following reply from Marc Okrand:]

Marc Okrand I don't think I've actually had to come up with words for "telephone" or "fax" before. Anyway, I like your version of "fax" (though I'd probably make it two words: nav HablI'). For "phone," I think I'd do something parallel to your "fax": ghogh HablI' ("voice transceiver").

As for Hoch for "general" -- that works, if you consider Hoch to mean "everyone" (so the front desk fax is the "everyone fax"). The only problem there is that it could be misinterpreted as "all (the) fax machines," since a plural suffix on nouns is never required. Perhaps an alternative is to use le'be' "unexceptional," which might also be translated "nonspecific" or the like (nav HablI' le'be').