Numbers and Time

This lesson is going to cover numbers, telling the time and the days of the week. So let us jump right in and look at the Klingon numbers from zero to ten.

Numbers above nine are created by adding different number forming elements. So ten is wa', one, plus maH, the element for ten. Eleven is wa'maH wa', twelve is wa'maH cha', fifty seven is vaghmaH Soch. For higher numbers there are other elements:

These elements are used in the same was as maH, ten, was. Notice there are two elements for thousand. Both are correct and freely interchangeable, so wa'SaD and wa'SanID both mean one thousand. Here is an example of a really big number in Klingon:

2836031

2836031

cha''uy' chorghbIp wejnetlh javSaD wejmaH wa'

two million eight hundred thirty six thousand and thirty one

Now that we have covered the basic numbers, let's move on to telling time.

First we will cover a couple of phrases used to ask what the time is:

The first of these phrases is easy to understand and is the most common way to get the exact time. There are two ways to answer this question. You can either say rep followed by the numbers that make up the time, or say the hours followed by vatlh followed by the minutes and ending with rep.

The second phrase, 'arlogh Qoylu'pu', is actually an ancient idiomatic phrase that means "How many times has it been heard?". In the past people were told the hour by some loud noise: a bell, howl or drum; so they would ask each other the time by asking how many noises have been made. To answer this you just say the hour (in twenty four hour format) plus the repetition number element logh. If it was two o'clock in the morning and someone asked 'arlogh Qoylu'pu' the reply would be cha'logh (twice). Here are some more examples.

Literally these phrases translate to nine times, eleven times, seventeen times and twenty times representing the number of times the sound would have occured. This form is inprecise as the minutes cannot be told.

To ask when something is happening, the most common word to use is ghorgh when. This is added to the beginning of any sentence to turn it into a question. The answer could be the exact time, a day, or an event. When answering questions of this type, either of the time formats using rep can be used.

'arlogh Qoylu'pu' can also be used to ask which hour it was when something was done, although this is still idomatic and will get a less precise answer than using ghorgh. The answer to this would be the number of the hour when the event being asked about occured (eg wa'maH Sochlogh seventeenth).

For both of these methods, the answer could also just be the hour. chorgh vatlh rep, rep jav wejmaH and chorghlogh could be the answers to the questions above.

The days of the week are:

We don't know the names of the Klingon months but we can refer to the Terran months by simply numbering them.

The word tera' in these names simply means Terran and can be dropped in most conversations. Only when you want to talk about the difference between Terran months (tera' jar) and Klingon months (tlhIngan jar) would you actually use it.