The Borg Language On-Line CourseLesson OneWelcome to the Borg Language On-Line Course! This is the first lesson of a 10-lesson course of study. To take the course, just read the text, fill in the answers to the study questions, and submit the form. A window will open with the correct answers, and you will be directed to the next lesson.Despite its odd appearance, Borg is actually very easy to learn. It is completely regular in its spelling and its grammar. Every affix has only one possible meaning. By the end of the 10-lesson course, you should have all the information you'll need to continue on your own. You'll also be able to converse with any Borg you should meet (which, of course, we hope never happens!). The Borg Alphabet
Most of the letters have the same sound as English; we will present a few of the unusual sounds each lesson. Just remember that the capital letters are important; always capitalize them, and never capitalize the other letters, even at the start of a sentence. Do not use ? as a question mark; it is a letter of the alphabet. Borg has its own alphabet, which the Borg use to write it among themselves, but in these lessons we'll use the roman letters given above. Borg doesn't use punctuation, either, but we will use the period occasionally to end sentences. The sounds we will look at first in this lesson are the vowels, a e i o u. These are pronounced with their "continental" values: father, bet, machine, go, tune. In English, o is usually pronounced like two letters, o+u; but in Borg, it is a pure o. The sounds ' and ? are full-fledged letters, known as stops. The ' is the sound that occurs in the middle of a phrase like ah-ah!. The ? is produced like the ', but with more force, almost like a grunt, as the air in your lungs is released (if it feels a little like vomiting, you've probably got it right). Don't be discouraged if you find these sounds hard. Just be sure to keep them separate in spelling. Borg WordsBorg words are made up of syllables, of the patterns CvC or CCv. The CvC words are the basic building blocks of the sentence; the CCv words are the helper words of the sentence. Words can be made of one or more syllables. Words of more than one syllable are accented on the first vowel of the word (that is, spoken more forcefully and at a slightly higher pitch). For now, we'll concentrate on one syllable words.
Nouns and VerbsSentences are all about things and the actions they perform or which are performed on them. The things are called nouns, and the actions are called verbs. These are some of those basic CvC building blocks. Borg nouns always have a or o as their central vowel, and verbs always have u.The noun which performs the action of the verb is the subject of the sentence, and the noun which receives the action is the object. You can tell the subject from the object because the object always has the letter y prefixed to the vowel a or o. If you are talking about more than one of a particular subject or object, you can make the noun plural by adding r after the vowel. In order to show when the subject performed its action, the basic CuC verb is given an infix of the pattern vC before the u to indicate its tense (time when the action occured).
ri'uq voq lwe jya? lwe The person conquers the planet These sentences illustrate many important points of Borg grammar. First, we see that in a simple sentence, the verb comes first. Using an infix (-i'-), the verb has been put in the present tense to show that the action is happening now. The subject comes next, without any marks. The object follows, and is marked with a y on the vowel. Both nouns are followed by the helper word lwe the. The second sentence is identical to the first, except that both nouns are plural, which is marked by the r on their vowels. Finally, notice that one noun has o as its vowel and the other has a; in Borg, all nouns referring to persons take o as their vowel, and all other nouns take a. Verb TensesAs we noted, the infix -i'- is used to show present tense, that the action is happening now (from the viewpoint of the speaker). The other tense infixes are -iw-, for past tense (action in the past), and -il-, for future tense (action yet to occur). There are other verb infixes, which we will introduce as we go along. Note that the verb does not show who or how many subjects performed the action, or anything about the object; it shows only the time of the action. Also, adding another syllable to the word puts the accent on the first vowel (the i) of the verb.Questions and AnswersOnce you can make simple sentences, you can turn them into questions just by adding the helper word chqu at the beginning of the sentence: chqu riwuq borgh lwe jya? lwe Did the Borg conquer the planet? You can answer the question Yes just by repeating the verb without the chqu: riwuq yes, they did. If you want to answer No, use the helper word qra: qra riwuq no, they did not.
To SummarizeSo that's the first lesson! You're well on your way to speaking Borg like a native. To re-cap, here's what was introduced this lesson:
Vocabulary
ExercisesDon't pressENTER when typing in the text boxes!
© 1998, Terrence Donnelly
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