[tlhIngan Hol] "Seasons of Love" in Klingon / And two grammatical questions

[Iikka Hauhio]

> be' Huch paq je and be' Huchmo' paqmo' je are both grammatically correct and ambiguous (by the way, any canonical examples of these structures?).

Here is an example from Skybox Cards where {Duj} modifies both {nuH pat} and {Hub pat}:

HoS law'qu' luch law'qu' je lo' Duj nuH pat Hub pat je.
A huge amount of the ship's power and technology is devoted to its weapons grid and defensive systems.

And here is an example of type-5 suffixes used with {je} from paq'batlh:

'ej Hoch vengHomDaq Hoch vengDaq je

Suchbogh ghaH qeylIS luQoy

woQ le'yo' je 'aghbej ghaH
And Kahless spoke to them

In every village and city he went,

Filled with pride and authority,

> A noun can modify in a noun-noun construction two or more conjoined nouns (even if these conjoined nouns have type-5 suffixes). Therefore, one of the possible interpretations of the phrases above is: the woman's money and book / because of the woman's money and book.

Yes, as the SkyBox example shows. It doesn't have type-5 suffixes, but I don't think we have any reason to believe it couldn't.

> To avoid ambiguity we could use (human) punctuation: be' Huch, paq je for the woman's money and the book or be', Huch, paq je for the woman, the money and the book, and so on.

If we assume that a comma should not be placed inside a noun-noun construct, {be', Huch, paq je} with two commas would be unambiguous. However, {be' Huch, paq je} would still be ambiguous. If woman has both money and the book, the comma must be between {Huch} and {paq}, as they are the two conjoined nouns. If we talk about the woman's money and the book, the conjoined nouns are {be' Huch} and {paq}, and the comma is still in the same location.

> Or we could recast: be' Huch, be' paq je for the woman's money and book or Huch ghaj be', Huchvam paq je for the woman's money and the book, and so on.

This is okay, if we want the phrase to be unambiguous. Other way would be {paq, be' Huch je}.

Iikka "fergusq" Hauhio
https://klingonia.fi/en

On Tuesday, January 11th, 2022 at 13.20, luis.chaparro at web.de wrote:

> Thank you, Iikka Hauhio, charghwI' and SuStel for your detailed posts!
>
> SuStel:
>
>>> I think we disagree less than you think. Yes, punctuate liberally in order to make yourself as clear as possible TO YOUR AUDIENCE. In this case, the audience is a group of humans who are learning Klingon as a non-primary language. Those humans may better understand what you write because of your use of punctuation that fits the conventions of the not-Klingon language common to members of your audience.
>
>>> What I object to is the suggestion that we have the slightest clue how punctuation is used by Klingons when they write using their native language.
>
>> No one is talking about that. Luis is asking how he should write things to us, the Klingon-speaking people of the real world.
>
> We have no canonical information on punctuation in pIqaD, or really anything else about it. Worf saying teehongee jee! is more informative to us than any Klingon writing we've seen prior to Star Trek: Discovery.
>
> I wouldn't dare to write anything to a Klingon, so yes, I just wanted to know if punctuation could help us humans to better communicate in Klingon :-) Thanks to all of you, however, for the very interesting insight into this topic and its background.
>
>> No, I don't think that's what Luis has been asking. He's concerned with groupings of noun phrases and what ways they can be interpreted. Punctuation was offered as a tool for disambiguating and clarifying, but it doesn't reach the core of what Luis has been asking.
>
> Since this thread got a bit long, I would like to summarize, to see if I've understood it properly:
>
> 1.be' Huch paq je and be' Huchmo' paqmo' je are both grammatically correct and ambiguous (by the way, any canonical examples of these structures?).
>
> -
>
> A noun can modify in a noun-noun construction two or more conjoined nouns (even if these conjoined nouns have type-5 suffixes). Therefore, one of the possible interpretations of the phrases above is: the woman's money and book / because of the woman's money and book.
>
> -
>
> To avoid ambiguity we could use (human) punctuation: be' Huch, paq je for the woman's money and the book or be', Huch, paq je for the woman, the money and the book, and so on.
>
> -
>
> Or we could recast: be' Huch, be' paq je for the woman's money and book or Huch ghaj be', Huchvam paq je for the woman's money and the book, and so on.
>
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>
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
>
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