[tlhIngan Hol] Suffix position: semantically significant?

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Jun 7, 2018, at 08:42, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> Am 07.06.2018 um 15:25 schrieb Daniel Dadap:
>> My intuition tells me [...]
> 
> That's your Terran English speaking intuition. :-)
> 

Indeed. I learned early on not to trust my intuitions, hence why I asked. :)

> I understand your point. It's the classic "I must open the door" problem, *vI-poSmoH-nIS.
> 
> A short answer is simply: That's the way Klingon works, get used to it.
> 
> longer answer:
> Indeed this sometimes causes ambiguous situations, and if you really want to avoid ambiguity, you must either rephrase it, or add suffixes like -qu' to mark the important suffix. But there's no way to change the system of the suffixes order. And after a while you will even get used to the correct order.
> 
> Besides, a suffix does not only modify its preceding suffixes or word parts, it modifies the entire thing. It really is hard sometimes, and you cannot do wordplays you may do in English by switching words.
> 

Okay, thanks. Yeah, I think I am starting to get used to the order, since after I wrote *{vIjatlhlaHnISba'}, I immediately got the feeling that it wasn’t quite right. Now I just need to get used to the order not meaning what I feel like it means. :)

> 
> -- 
> Lieven L. Litaer
> aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"
> http://www.klingonisch.de
> http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/StarTrekDiscovery
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org