Greek to Klingon in pIqaD: preserve event viewpoint before changing the writing system
Greek time and viewpoint are separate pieces of the message
Tsangalidis’s study of the Modern Greek verb explains that imperfective and perfective forms do not simply distinguish long events from short ones. Both viewpoints can describe the same time interval. A pIqaD translation must therefore preserve how the Greek event is presented as well as when it happens; changing alphabets cannot make that grammatical decision.
The study illustrates related Greek aspectual contrasts in past and future forms. This is useful when a source describes an activity continuing at a stated time, rather than merely placing an event in the past. The intended target must express the relevant event structure without assuming that every Greek past ending requires a corresponding Klingon tense ending.
For a Greek account of running during a particular period, identify the time expression and the continuing-event interpretation separately. A visually complete line of pIqaD is not evidence that both survived. The script represents the chosen Klingon wording, so an earlier mistake in interpreting the Greek predicate remains a meaning error after successful character conversion.
Klingon ongoing aspect does not itself establish past or future
The Klingon Language Institute’s teaching lesson explains -taH as continuous or ongoing aspect. Its jIqettaH can describe running now, in the past or in the future, depending on context. Thus a Greek imperfective past may need its past-time information retained through context or another expression; the ongoing suffix alone does not supply it.
The lesson also warns that an ongoing interpretation is not mechanically determined by an English-style progressive equivalent. Applied to Greek, the useful lesson is to interpret the source event rather than match a familiar translated label. A Greek viewpoint distinction and a Klingon aspect suffix belong to different systems, even where their uses overlap.
The same course demonstrates how suffix order changes negation scope: vIjatlhlaHbe' concerns inability to speak, while vIjatlhbe'laH concerns ability not to speak. Those Roman forms are explanatory examples for the grammar underlying pIqaD. If a Greek message distinguishes inability from choosing silence, preserve that scope before rendering the target characters; rearranging them for appearance cannot repair the wrong meaning.
pIqaD is a character mapping, not decorative replacement
The Institute’s writing reference distinguishes Okrand’s standard Roman orthography from the character set used by KLI members for pIqaD. It explains that Klingon sounds were mapped to that character set. Translating Greek into pIqaD therefore requires Klingon wording first; substituting unfamiliar-looking characters for Greek letters would not perform the linguistic translation.
The reference describes a convention of writing horizontally from left to right and often placing each sentence on its own centered line. It also notes that the displayed character set lacks punctuation symbols. Those conventions are not a reason to erase distinctions between separate Greek statements or combine them into one ambiguous string. Preserve the sentence boundaries in an appropriate presentation.
The page distinguishes meaningful use of the characters from earlier on-screen decorative sequences. For a Greek reader checking a pIqaD result, visual resemblance to a fictional inscription is consequently insufficient. The important content remains the interpreted time, viewpoint and scope expressed by the underlying Klingon sentence, followed by a consistent mapping to the selected writing system.
Language references