Klingon Grammar Addenda

Key: Spoken by Okrand | Inferred from canon | Accepted usage

4. Verbs

4.1. Pronominal prefixes

   4.1.1. Basic prefixes

The prefix trick: When a verb has a first or second person indirect object (marked with ­vaD), and a third­person object or no object, the indirect object can be shown by using a verb prefix whose object is the appropriate person: eg. SoHvaD paq vInob = paq qanob "I give you a book"; HInob "Give it to me!" [MSN 6/97]

This is similar to English, where "I give you a book" and "I give a book to you" are equivalent. Note that this works only with 1st and 2nd person indirect objects, mainly because there'd be no way to distinguish direct from indirect object if both were 3rd person.
 

4.2. Verb suffixes

   4.2.1. Oneself/One another

Imperatives with stative verbs require the extra suffixes ­'eghmoH, eg. yItuj'eghmoH "Warm yourself!" [KGT p.117]

   4.2.5. Indefinite subject/ability

The verb prefix lu­ when used with the indefinite suffix ­lu' and with plural objects is often omitted, especially in equivalents to English "There is/are" sentences, although this is somewhat ungrammatical, eg. naDev tlhInganpu' tu'lu' "There are Klingons here" [KGT p.171; HQ7:3 p.4]

   4.2.7. Aspect

The perfective suffixes ­pu'/­ta' do not indicate past tense. Klingon has no tenses. They indicate action completed in the time context of the rest of the discourse. The time context may be present, past or future. [CK; HQ2:1 p.10; HQ2:4 p.11]

A common beginner's mistake is to assume, when telling a story, that since the action of the story is over, all the verbs should have ­ta' or ­pu'. But these are properly used only when describing action completed at the time of the story. You should mentally place yourself at the time the story is happening. For any given verb, ask yourself if the action is completed at that time (a good rule of thumb: if you can use the word "already" to describe the action of the verb, it is probably perfective). If it is completed, that verb takes the perfective suffix. Since most of the verbs in your story are describing events occuring at the time of the story, they do not take the perfective.
     One source of the confusion about this is that some of the examples in TKD itself seem to use ­pu' as a past­tense marker. In fact, MO has admitted that originally, when he was designing the language, ­pu' was indeed intended to be a simple marker of the past tense. But he changed his mind and decided to eliminate tense entirely and change ­pu' to an aspect marker. Those examples that seem to indicate simple past slipped past the re­editing process.
 

   4.2.9. Syntactic markers

  1. The placement of verbs with ­jaj in the sentence depends on the type of sentence: with formal toasts, the order of the sentence is O­S­V, eg. 'IwlIj jachjaj "May your blood scream" , but in regular sentences, it is the usual O­V­S, eg. jejjaj tajlIj "May your knife be sharp." [KGT p.25]

  2. Verbs with ­jaj may take Type 7 aspect suffixes (contra TKD), eg. wo' DevtaHjaj ghawran [KGT p.25-26]

  3. Verbs with ­ghach are very rare and highly marked. These nominalized verbs are not generally the equivalent of simple nouns, but of abstracts and process nouns (those in English with suffixes like ­ness, ­tion), so most examples require another verb suffix in addition to ­ghach, such as ­taH. These nominalized verbs never take subject/object prefixes. [HQ3:3 p.10]

    For most of us, this means don't use ­ghach except for words found in the dictionary, until you have a really good feel for it.
     

4.4. Adjectives

  1. When a noun has more than one adjective, one of the following forms is used: SuD Dargh 'ej wov or SuDbogh Dargh 'ej wovbogh [KGT p.82]

    The examples given seem clunky to me, and I wonder if they are the only possibilities: ?SuDbogh Dargh wov wItlhutlh, ?SuDbogh 'ej wovbogh Dargh..., ?SuDbogh Dargh 'ej wovbogh.... Personally, I prefer the first possibility. There is one canon example yIntaHbogh tlhIngan Soj tlhol... [S21], which seems to support this, although yIn isn't a descriptive verb.
         (It's also possible that this usage is restricted to color adjectives, but I find this unlikely. Color adjectives are regular verbs in every other sense, so why should they behave differently just because they are used in pairs?)
     

  2. Descriptive verbs used adjectivally (i.e. after the noun) we have seen take only the suffixes ­qu' (tInqu'), ­Ha' (ngaDHa') and ­be' (lo'laHbe'). [TKD; KGT p.150]

    When used as verbs (i.e, before the noun), descriptive verbs can take any verb suffix that is appropriate.
     

©1999 Terrence Donnelly