[tlhIngan Hol] {'e' qa'} "instead of" with the {qa'} bearing suffixes

[Will Martin]

I won’t presume that this is not some new thing that canon suggests as correct, but as a person who attended qep’a’ wa’DIch and has worked with the language for many years, I find your suggestion very confusing because:

1. Making the second sentence of a Sentence As Object construction a dependent clause is uncommon, surfing the edge of complexity limits of the language. Add anything else in terms of complexity and communication might suffer.
2. Preceding the Sentence As Object construction with a sentence that represents the subject of the second sentence of the Sentence As Object construction is probably a bridge too far.
3. Item 2 comes dangerously close to attempting a *Sentence As Subject* construction, which Klingon doesn’t have.
4. This comes really close to the Irrealis, which is problematic in Klingon. You are apparently trying to say, “If we WOULD replace swords with phasers, then we WOULD succeed.” Klingon doesn’t do “would”.

Meanwhile, you aren’t expressing anything that isn’t more simply stated as:

yan yIbuS! pu’ DIwIvchugh, maQap!

Or:

yan yIbuS! pu’ DImaSchugh, maQap!

I honestly think you are trying to map too many distant grammatical connections together. Odds are high that your reader will not follow your thread. The character of Klingon as a language is more direct, more brutal, and not so logically extended as you are trying to make it.

That’s not to invalidate other opinions. I’m just explaining how this example strikes me.

If your whole point is to figure out how to use {qa’}, perhaps:

maQapmeH yan qa’nIS pu’.

> On Nov 18, 2021, at 7:51 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Suppose I write:
> 
> {pu' DIlo'; yan DIlo' 'e' qa'chugh, maQap}
> if we use phasers instead of swords, we'll win
> 
> Would this be correct/acceptable?
> 
> --
> Dana'an 
> https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/
> Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ
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