[tlhIngan Hol] A thought on the irrealis construction

kechpaja kechpaja at comcast.net
Tue Nov 8 03:55:23 PST 2016


On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 10:31:08AM +0100, De'vID wrote:
> On 7 November 2016 at 10:21, Lieven <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Actually, I'm pretty happy to be able to say now {latlh loD SoH net
> > jalchugh, vaj qaHoH.}, but I would have preferred it be done with a
> > different kind of suffix. But Okrand told us this weekend, that according to
> > Maltz, we should have received nearly all of the existing suffixes - but
> > there may be more, perhabs.
> 
> It would be very weird, at this point, to get any more (let's say,
> "modern {ta' Hol}") suffixes, considering the volume of canon we have.
> What are the chances that a commonplace suffix would fail to appear in
> important Klingon works such as {paq'batlh} and {Hamlet}?

I was under the impression that {Hamlet} wasn't actually canon — am I
wrong about that? 

At this point, we've seen a number of suffixes that can also be used as
independant verbs, which suggests that the boundary between what's a
suffix and what's a verb might be a bit blurrier in Klingon than in
English. More concretely, I've been wondering if the verb {neH} might be
on its way to being grammaticalized (especially since it's already in a 
special category as the only verb that can take a SAO without {'e'}).
Maybe in some progressive dialects it's already there (I'd expect it to
be type 2, but that isn't necessarily a given). 

pItlh

-SapIr



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