[tlhIngan Hol] Type 9-ed verb as SAO

[Hugh Son puqloD]

> On Dec 4, 2019, at 07:31, Will Martin <willmartin2 at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> It occurs to me that in this thread, we may have omitted what {‘e’} may most likely be referring to. Look at the last thing SHE said before {‘e’}: “War is obsolete, as we are in danger of becoming.” Likely, THAT is what her father didn’t want.
> 
> The dialog among the others may very well have been a simple interruption of her self-contained SAO.

That’s a compelling interpretation, and {manotlhchoH je maH} actually seems to make more sense as a referent for {'e'} than the other previously mentioned candidates. It also makes the {'a} make more sense. The line was:

{ghu' Dayajbe'law' Sa' notlh veS 'a tugh manotlhchoH je maH}

Which was captioned as:

War is obsolete, General. As we are in danger of becoming.

But actually means:

You appear not to understand the situation, General. War is obsolete. But we will also become obsolete soon.

If that’s all 'a'Setbur wanted to say, she could have left out the {'a} or used {'ej} instead. “War is obsolete. (And) soon we will be obsolete too.”

But if she really intended to say:

{notlh veS 'a tugh manotlhchoH je maH neHbe' vavoy} - War is obsolete, but daddy didn’t want us to soon become obsolete as well.

… but was interrupted in the middle of her delivery, then the unusual {'e'} could also make sense as an indicator that she’s continuing what she was in the middle of saying.

AZETBUR: War is obsolete. But for us to also soon become obsolete…
INTERRUPTING CHANG: A death while standing is preferable to a life while kneeling!
A: *ahem*, back to what I was saying, daddy didn’t want that.

None of that is to say that {'e'} can’t be used to refer to something somebody else has said. Even if this is the only example in canon that appears to show somebody doing that, and it turns out that wasn’t what was happening, there aren’t any rules that say it can *only* refer to the previous sentence of the same person who said {'e'}. TKD just says “the previous sentence as a whole.” It could still be the case that a conversation like this is totally fine:

1: ghaytan nuSuvrupqa' jagh
2: loQ 'e' vIHon

… we just may not have canon to support that usage. There is still a lot that we don’t know about Klingon grammar.