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

[SuStel]

On 1/21/2020 11:28 AM, nIqolay Q wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 9:22 AM SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name 
> <mailto: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.

See my other post. This falls in the area between clearly grammatical 
and clearly ungrammatical.

There certainly is some verbiness to pronouns when they operate in an 
identity, in that the identity may be continuous or completed or 
beginning or interrogative or conditional, etc. But pronouns still 
aren't verbs. They don't take verb prefixes, they don't take objects, 
they can't be nominalized, and when they're not tying two nouns together 
they are the subject of the sentence. *chaH* doesn't mean /they are;/ it 
just means /they, them./ The /are/ comes from translating it into 
English, which requires a form of the verb /be/ in this kind of 
sentence. In the Klingon, you just shove a pronoun next to a noun to 
make them equivalent.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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