[tlhIngan Hol] can I say {jaghpu' chaH chaH'e'} ?

[nIqolay Q]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 9:22 AM SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:

> Ungrammatical. No, there's no rule against it, but it's obviously not said
> this way. The *chaH* is NOT the verb *are.* It's the pronoun *they, them.*
> In Klingon, pronouns are not verbs, even when they are the center of a
> copula sentence.
>
I'm not sure it's quite so clearly defined as that. Copula pronouns can
take verbal suffixes, after all. And we know from the latest qepHom (
http://www.qephom.de/book/qepHom2019_p_21.jpg) that not all Klingons
analyze words into distinct parts of speech the same way. It's possible
that a Klingon might consider *chaH* to be both a pronoun and a verb, in
the same way that some people analyze *ret* as both a noun and a verb in
different contexts.

To me, *jaghpu' chaH chaH'e'* doesn't feel ungrammatical so much as
redundant or a bit clumsy, like the speaker missed some shorter way to
express the same idea. If *chaH* *is* conceived of solely as a pronoun, I
wonder if something like *jaghpu' chaH'e'* would work to
emphasize/topicalize it.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20200121/7396591d/attachment-0015.htm>