[tlhIngan Hol] Expressing "all of us"

Sun Jan 28 03:56:51 PST 2018

I wonder if «Hoch maH» and «maH Hoch» might be somewhat different.

We normally use «X Hoch» for "all X" and «X Hoch» for "the entirety of X".
So, I'm thinking:

«Hoch maH» = all possible "us"es (if that's a sensible concept); perhaps a particularly large in-group (such referring to a whole species or civilization; "ALL of us are made of starstuff.")

«maH Hoch» = all/each of us, without exception (useful for describing unanimous vs. collective decisions and the like)

«maH Hoch» is interesting in that it could perhaps be singular, making it unlike «maH» in both person and number.

//loghaD
________________________________
From: tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol-bounces at lists.kli.org> on behalf of mayqel qunenoS <mihkoun at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2018 12:49:08 PM
To: tlhingan-hol at kli.org
Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] Expressing "all of us"

Thank you all for replying.

Reading your replies, I learned something important, something which eluded me so far.

I didn't know that in a noun-noun construction, where the second noun is {Hoch} or {HochHom}, that this second noun is the head-noun. All this time I believed, that some special rules apply, with regards to the {Hoch} and {HochHom}. But apparently they don't, so I learned something important, thanks.

However, as Rhona Fenwick pointed out, why not use {Hoch maH} ?

Even if {maH Hoch} indeed violates the accord rule, the {Hoch maH} evades the accord problem, so everything is ok.

So, unless someone disagrees with Rhona, I will be using {Hoch maH}, which I like a lot.

Thank you QeS, for sharing this idea.

~ nI'ghma

On Jan 28, 2018 10:04, "Rhona Fenwick" <qeslagh at hotmail.com<mailto:qeslagh at hotmail.com>> wrote:

ghItlhpu' mayqel, jatlhpu':

> Sometime ago, I had asked of a way to say "all of us", as if in "all of us like cats".

(poD vay')

> {vIghro'mey DImuSHa' maH Hoch} ?
> all of us love cats

As others have pointed out, since the head of the phrase maH Hoch is still Hoch, it should condition third-person agreement.

With that said, I think that it should not be maH Hoch as nIqolay suggests, but Hoch maH. Hoch thus acts as a normal quantifier for its nominal (in this case, pronominal) head. For instance, we know Hoch nuvpu' is "all of the people", and we also know from paq'batlh that Hoch negh is "all of the soldiers" (paq'raD 11.21), and it's only a very small step to go from these to Hoch maH, which should take first-person plural agreement. We don't have any canon examples, but I feel it's a natural extension of the properties of both Hoch and pronouns as outlined in TKD 5.1. I don't think it's the least bit unnatural to say, for instance, targh DIparHa' 'op maH 'ach vIghro' DIparHa' Hoch maH "some of us like targs, but all of us like cats".

Whether we can leave out the free pronoun maH to give the same meaning is, of course, an entirely different kettle of qagh. Many pro-drop languages permit this: Georgian, Turkish, Finnish and Spanish, at least. But we can't in good conscience assume that Klingon also does this, not least because Klingon seems to be more rigid with its targets of agreement than many Earth languages are.

jangpu' SuStel, jatlh:

> The fierceness with which people desire a y'all in Klingon horrifies me. This is no different.

I disagree strongly. Not only are the conversational implicatures of speaking to a bunch of people versus speaking on behalf of a bunch of people quite different, but a vast array of human languages with rigidly defined number agreement are quite happy to allow plural pronouns of all sorts to be quantified. What's more, in Klingon there's nothing we know explicitly about either maH or Hoch that should in principle get in the way of our using them together should the situation call for it. The only problem we have is that we just don't have an explicit canon example illustrating how or whether Klingon quantifies pronouns, though I believe we have enough information about both quantifiers and free pronouns to be able to extrapolate (in the absence of a contradictory formal rule, at least).

Also, no less a speaker than Seqram consciously lampshaded the "all of us" question at the end of his article about Hoch more than two decades ago (HolQeD 5:2.11), so with all due respect (and I do have much respect for you), maybe ease up a bit on being horrified.

QeS 'utlh

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