From: Marc Okrand mokrand@
Newsgroups: startrek.klingon
Date: Monday, December 07, 1998 12:55 AM
Subject: Re: walls


Actually, there are several words referring to "wall":

An interior wall (such as a wall separating your living
room from your kitchen) is a tlhoy'.

An exterior wall (that is, a wall which separates the
inside of a building from the outside) is a reD.

For the interior side of an exterior wall, it is quite
common to use tlhoy', but the phrase pa' reD, literally
"room's exterior wall" (pa' "room") is also heard,
referring to the wall in a room which faces outside (as
opposed to the other walls in the room whose other sides
are still indoors).

The wall around a city is a yergho, which is apparently
derived from yer "domain, holdings, territory" plus gho
"circle."

A wall which divides a territory into parts (such as the
Berlin Wall) is also called a tlhoy', even though neither
side of it is the interior of a structure. On occasion,
for clarity, such a wall is termed a chevwI' tlhoy'
"separator wall" (chev "separate," -wI' "that which
does ") or a pIn tlhoy', literally "boss
wall," presumably dating back to a time when each
subterritory had a specific person in charge.

The phrase pa' tlhoy' "room's interior wall" is also
heard from time to time, but usually only when it is
necessary to distinguish the "interior wall" sense of
tlhoy' from the "separator wall" sense.


A tlhoy' "interior wall" need not be vertical. In a
multistory structure, the stories are separated by what
Klingon architects and builders call a tlhoy' SaS
"horizontal wall" (tlhoy' "interior wall," SaS "be
horizontal"). The side of this "wall" which is the bottom
of the upper story is the rav "floor"; the side which is
the top of the lower story is the rav'eq "ceiling" (based
on rav "floor" plus 'eq, an element otherwise unknown
(there is no evidence it is connected to 'eq "be early").

rav "floor" is also used for the floor of a room on
ground level (or a basement floor, for that matter), even
though there is no corresponding rav'eq and no tlhoy'
SaS.

Similarly, though in general rav'eq "ceiling" refers to
the ceiling of a room that has a room above it, it may also
be used for the ceiling of a room on the top floor, even
though there is no corresponding rav and no tlhoy' SaS.
On occasion, though, the ceiling of the top floor is called
pa' beb, literally "room's roof" (from pa' "room" plus
beb "roof"). The term beb refers to the covering on
top of a structure.

Hope this helps your story.


TPO wrote in message [email protected]...
Marc, you here?

I'm working on a literary piece that makes many references
to a wall or
walls.
Any ideas how I can handle this? (recast, metaphor, ...)

DloraH