Useful phrases

QumwI’ yIchu’! (“Activate communicator!”)

Hello and welcome to Duolingo’s course in Klingon! We’re excited to bring the language of the future to your primitive technical devices!

We would like to tell you “Hello and welcome” in Klingon, but as you will see, Klingon does not have equivalents to those words. Klingons tend to be very direct and rarely engage in conversation simply for the pleasure of conversing, making superfluous many of the pleasantries we are accustomed to using in English.

In this part of the course, we will focus on getting you using Klingon right away by introducing useful phrases. The grammar for these phrases will be explained in future lessons.

Alphabet

The Klingon alphabet has the following letters: 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 ‘.

Note that case matters: many letters are always lowercase (even at the beginning of a sentence!) and some are always uppercase.

Note I (capital i) versus l (small L) - the second has a small curl at the bottom in Duolingo’s website font.

Q and q are two separate letters. ch gh ng tlh count as single consonants in Klingon.

And ‘ (the apostrophe) also counts as a letter. It represents a glottal stop.

More about pronunciation will be presented in the “Sounds” Skill.

nuqneH & nuqjatlh

nuqneH is a truncated form of nuq DaneH, meaning “What do you want?”

It is a common misconception that this is “the Klingon word for hello”. In fact, Klingons have no word for hello. If a Klingon wishes to say something, they’ll walk up to you and say it, without wasting time - as they see it - on idle chatter.

nuqjatlh? is a truncated form of nuq Dajatlh?, meaning “What did you say?”

Qapla’

Klingon for “success”.

This word is often mistranslated as “Goodbye”, due to the fact that it is often heard at the end of conversations. In fact, Klingon has no word for “Goodbye”, but Qapla’ is often used either to congratulate somebody on their success or to wish them success in the future.

Video

Quvar - also known as the Klingon Teacher from Germany - has produced an informative video about the words nuqneH and Qapla’, available in both English and German.

Verbs

Klingon verbs do not have tense (past, present, future), so a verb such as yaj could mean “understands, understood, will understand”.

They do have aspect (e.g. whether an action is completed or is continuous), but that will come later in the course. For now, translate verbs as non-continuous forms (e.g. “he walks” or “he walked”, not “he is walking” or “he was walking”) until the continuous aspect is introduced.

In grammar, a subject is the one doing the action and an object is the one the action is done to. Klingon verbs show the subject and the object of verbs by means of prefixes.

The most important verb prefixes at the beginning of the course are:

• jI- = I (subject), no object
• bI- = you (subject), no object – for one person
• vI- = I (subject), him/her/it/them (object)
• Da- = you (subject), him/her/it/them (object) – for one person

If the subject is third person (he/she/it/they) and has either no object or a third-person object (him/her/it/them), then the verb has no prefix. (With the exception of “they - him/her/it”, which you will learn later). So a verb such as yaj can mean “he understands; she understands; it understands; they understand; he understands him/her/it/them; she understands him/her/it/them; they understand them”, or the same in the past or future.

Because of the verbal prefixes, the subject and/or object does not have to be included as a pronoun, and subject or object pronouns are often left off.

Torg and Mara

In this lesson, you will meet Torg and Mara. They will appear in many sentences where a name is useful. (Later on, more names will appear, too.)

Torg is male and Mara is female - though that fact is not important to Klingon grammar, as there are no separate words for “he” and “she”, or different verb prefixes or suffixes depending on gender.

Joining nouns with and without “and”

Nouns are joined with je, which comes after the nouns, as in torgh mara je “Torg and Mara”, or Hol pong je “the language and the name”.

If there is no je after two nouns next to each other, the effect is similar to possession: mara pong “Mara’s name”; tlhIngan Hol “a Klingon’s language, the Klingon language”.

Word order

Klingon word order in a sentence may seem like the opposite of English word order - first comes the object (if any), then the verb, then the subject. So a sentence such as mara legh torgh means “Torg sees Mara”.

Computer translations

You may be tempted to use computer translators, like Bing. Just don’t! The quality of Klingon machine translation is almost always very bad. Don’t report sentences from there.