[tlhIngan Hol] ja'chuq and jatlhchuq

[Will Martin]

Everything you suggest looks reasonable, though you’ve gone one step farther than Maltz has revealed. We have examples of a speaking sentence preceded or followed by the direct quote of a single sentence. Unless someone else has seen something I missed, we have no canon example of a speaking sentence introducing an entire dialog.

Maybe we can do this, or maybe you’d pair each quote with a {ja’/jatlh} sentence. I don’t know. Doing so would make it clearer who said what.

But I’m not giving you a rule here. I don’t have one to offer.

Maybe Klingons, when speaking, do what the Deaf do, and face in one direction, give the {ja’/jatlh} sentence revealing who speaks in that direction and then turns to the other direction and gives another {ja/jatlh} sentence revealing who speaks from that position to that direction, and then they act out the dialog, shifting back and forth, portraying both speakers.

Or, being non-human, maybe Klingons do something no human has thought to do. Maybe they punch you in the arm once to indicate the first person is speaking and then punch you in the arm twice to indicate the second person is speaking, and proceed to punch you once or twice to depict each speaker.

We just don’t know. 

Whatever the method they use, we also don’t know if they use the same method for speech as for written language.

Short of intentionally starting our own dialect, I don’t know how we’d resolve this without consulting Maltz.

lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
Door Repair Guy, Retired Honorably



> On May 20, 2020, at 8:37 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The two verbs which are undoubtedly "verbs of saying", are {ja'} and {jatlh}, meaning that we can use them in order to do quotations. But there two things I wonder:
> 
> 1. Could we use the {ja'chuq} as a verb of saying, i.e. to precede a quotation ? Could we do the following ?
> 
> {maja'chuqpu', (and here comes the dialogue)}
> 
> Or should we say the following instead ?
> 
> {maja'chuqpu'; majatlhpu', (and here comes the dialogue)}
> 
> 2. Could we say the following ? (This has nothing to do with the previous question; I'm asking since we're on the subject..)
> 
> {majatlhchuqpu', qamuSHa'}
> we told each other, "I love you"
> 
> ~ mayqel qunen'oS
> 
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