[tlhIngan Hol] Decomposed plural persons

Daniel Dadap daniel at dadap.net
Sat Jun 22 06:16:29 PDT 2019


Do we have any evidence in canon to support the use of verb prefixes referring to a plural subject or object, with the persons composing the plural subject or object being explicitly stated and only matching the person indicated by the verb prefix when considered as a group, but not individually? For example:

meq Daj wIrIchtaH be'nalwI' jIH je.
SughoH'a' SoH jIllI' je?
loDnI'lI' jIH je ghomuv!

I’ve always taken it for granted that one could say things like the above, but I realized recently that I wasn’t sure if I’d ever actually seen it done. If there isn’t any evidence to support breaking out the members of a plural person indicated by a verb prefix the way it’s done in the above examples, does anybody have any suggestions on how to do it? The usual answer would seem to be “split it into multiple sentences”, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to do that in a grammatically sound way without necessarily adding more context to fill in a missing verb slot, e.g.:

muvuQ meq Daj. be'nalwI' vuQ je. wIrIchtaH.
jIllI' DaQeHmoHlaw'pu'. SughoH'a'?
qaloS. DuloS je loDnI'lI'. ghomuv!

I suppose that something like {meq Daj wIrIchtaH. be'nalwI' jIH je maH.} might also be possible, but it really doesn’t sit right with me.



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