As used in canon: ghItlh vIghItlhta'bogh DalaD'a' Will you read my manuscript? TKD DaH maloS. peghItlh! [(untranslated) st.k (8/96) HQ 2.4: To mark (upon) something is ghItlh. This isn't just writing; it's any kind of marking. (Note that ghItlh, to write, refers to the physical act of writing. It doesn't mean to create a composition. KGT 80: Indeed, the verb ghItlh is most commonly translated as "write", but it always refers to the act of writing-that is, of making marks on some surface--not to the act of composition. Its use in the contexts of both sculpting and writing suggests that writing began as carving. st.k (7/09/1998): The verb for write in the sense of compose is qon, literally "record". This is used for songs and also for literary works (poems, plays, romance novels, and so on). As has been pointed out, it's as if the song or story is somehow out there and the "writer" comes into contact with it, extracts it (to use Qov's nice phrase), and records it. The verb usually translated "write," ghItlh, refers to the physical activity of writing (moving the pencil around, chiseling, etc.) The question is, if you can ghItlh it, must you also qon it? That is, is everything that is written down the result of composition (in the sense described above)? The answer is "not necessarily." There's another verb, gher, which doesn't have a straightforward equivalent in English, but which has sometimes been translated (not entirely satisfactorily) as "formulate" or "compile" or "pull together." The idea seems to be that of bringing thoughts together into some kind of reasonably coherent form so that they can be conveyed to someone else. Thus, one would usually say naD tetlh gher "he/she compiles the Commendation List" or "he/she writes the Commendation List". (Maltz laughed at, but accepted, Soj tetlh gher for "he/she writes the grocery list".) One would probably gher, rather than qon, a suggested list of readings, a gazetteer, a simple menu, or the instructions for assembling a toy (assuming the latter is not really an exercise in creative writing). One might also say QIn gher "he/she formulates a message" or, more colloquially, "he/she writes a message". But now it begins to get tricky. Using gher here implies that the writer of the message was passing along some information he or she got elsewhere, such as scribbling down a telephone message. Saying QIn qon "he/she composes a message" or "he/she writes a message" (literally "he/she records a message") suggests that the writer is presenting some new information as opposed to merely passing something along. It may also imply that the written message has some sort of literary merit, and thus be a compliment. But not always. HIDjolev qon "he/she composes the menu" suggests that the speaker thinks the list of available fare is written with a certain literary flair. This is not likely to be said of menus in Klingon restaurants (whose menus, if posted at all, tend to be rather pithy), and thus could easily be taken as an insult. Similarly, something like bom gher "he/she formulates the song" would be taken as a disparaging comment about the song or its composer (and is, in fact, sometimes heard when the song in question is of non-Klingon origin). This should help somewhat, but it will no doubt raise additional questions about usage. Maltz seems to be willing to try to tackle them as they come along. KGT 79: The closest to a general term in this realm may be the verb raQ, which means "manipulate by hand, handle". It can be applied to carving, sculpting, metalworking, and the like but is really much less specific, referring to activities that involve having some control over some object. KGT 80: Carving or incising is also done on flat surfaces, usually a stone panel or nagh beQ (literally, "flat rock"), a term that has been extended to mean the resulting artwork itself as well as similar pieces, including paintings. Related vocabulary: ghItlh manuscript (n) De' chu' ghItlh newspaper (n) ghItlhjaj Wednesday [if there's a pun, I don't see it!] per label (n) Degh emblem, symbol, insignia, marking, mark (n) ngav writer's cramp (n) QIn message (n DIj use a pigment stick, paint with pigment stick (v) ngoH smear, paint using fingers (v) nguvmoH dye, stain, tint (v)

qep'a' 30:

ghItlh refers to physical markings or inscriptions on a surface. It does not refer to text content of a document. It is not used to refer to books (although physical pages of a book do technically contain ghItlh).

The noun ghItlh originally referred to the marks made by engraving or carving or chiseling or the like, and it can still be used in this way. These marks could be pictures or characters (letters or whatever). Over time (perhaps because ghItlh could mean either "mark" or "marks") its meaning expanded a bit to include the totality of what was engraved (that is, it could refer to an individual mark or the  whole set of marks), and from there its meaning expanded to include written text of any kind. Later still, first probably as slang used among authors, the word also came to be used for a handwritten document and then a draft (in any format) of a document (or book) - that is, a "manuscript."