Help:A Guide to Klingon

Introduction
The Klingon language was developed by Marc Okrand for several Star Trek movies. "The Klingon Dictionary" (TKD) by Okrand provides a complete grammar, plus English-Klingon and Klingon-English translations. Klingon words in this dictionary are canonical. The TKD was published by Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, 1985, with a second edition with new addendum 1992, ISBN 0-671-74559-X.

The rest of this guide provides an overview of Klingon grammar.

Writing Klingon
There is a Klingon alphabet, called pIqaD. However most Humans (as well as Klingons) write Klingon using the Roman alphabet. The case of each letter is solely determined by its pronunciation. For example q and Q have different sounds and represent different letters, thus qoS and QoS are different words with different meanings (in addition to different pronunciations).

Note though, that, what may appear like an appostrophe is actually a separate Klingon letter ['], which represents a glottal stop (see pronunciation guide below).

Words
In Klingon there are three parts of speech: verbs (wotmey), nouns (DIpmey) and everything else (chuvmey).

Most words are compound, formed from a root plus affixes - prefixes and suffixes.

Verbs
A prefix is optional, and if used there can be only one. Prefixes are used when the subject of a verb is a pronoun.

There are nine types of suffixes. Only one suffix from each type may be used for a compound word. Suffixes must appear in type order: PREFIX-VERB-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9.

Prefixes
Blank entries indicate that the combination is not applicable.

Nouns
In a Klingon sentence the word order is the opposite of English. The subject comes after the verb and the object before it.

It may help to read the Klingon as if it is written in the passive voice, in the examples this is listed as Literal English. It is not the correct translation, but an aid to identifying the right subject and obect.

There are fives types of noun suffix. Only one of each type is allowed. Suffixes must appear in type order: NOUN-1-2-3-4-5.

Articles
There is no Klingon equivalent to the definite article (the) or the indefinite articles (a, an). When translating from Klingon they must be inferred from the context.

Adjectives
There are no adjectives in Klingon. Instead verbs which express a state or quality are used, with the noun as the object. For example, QaQ means to be good.

Numbers
Two suffixes used with Klingon numbers.

Questions
In addition to the verb prefix -'a', Klingon has words corresponding to the interrogative words of English.

The word order is important.