[tlhIngan Hol] x nuq vs nuq x & 'Iv x vs x 'Iv

Hugh Son puqloD Hugh at qeylIS.net
Sat Oct 12 05:09:51 PDT 2019


> On Oct 12, 2019, at 06:37, David Holt <kenjutsuka at live.com> wrote:
> 
> {mI'lIj 'oH nuq'e'?} is grammatical but very odd - it's not really wrong, just very weird - a bit like "You were talking with whom?" instead of "Who were you talking with?"

I’ve actually wondered about this form on a few occasions. In Conversational Klingon, one of the speech samples of the unidentified dialect which resembles Morskan is: {Sojvets 'o nuq}, and it’s explained that this sentence rendered in the standard dialect would be {Sojvetlh 'oH nuq'e'}. The form is, of course, identical to the canonical Morskan sentence {Dujvets 'o nuq} from Star Trek VI, so it can be presumed that that sentence would be {Dujvetlh 'oH nuq'e'} in {ta' Hol}.

However, outside of these examples, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a canonical question in the form {<noun> 'oH <question pronoun>'e'}. I suppose the examples of the other forms we have like {nuq 'oH ponglIj'e'} and {HoD 'Iv} are pretty rare so that could just be due to small sample size.



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