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

[Will Martin]

Thanks for your thoughtful response. It does look like, as you suggest, Okrand has not been sufficiently consistent for rules to be derived with certainty.

I could read {Qapla’meywIj Hoch vIta’ta’} as “I have accomplished the whole of my successes.” He’s speaking of all of his successes as one grand accomplishment. Apparently, he felt that honor would have made that accomplishment impossible, suggesting that the accomplishment is a higher priority than honor. No single success would have been more important than honor, but the whole collection of them held more moral mass than the abstract inconvenience of honor. Those who would speak of the importance of honor are, by his perspective, smaller minds with smaller goals.

As a Klingon, perhaps I would be content to be such a smaller mind.

Anyway, as you suggest, the finer points of the use of {Hoch} and {HochHom} have yet to be laid out for us clearly. Would that Maltz be more forthcoming.

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




> On Jan 6, 2022, at 10:33 AM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 1/6/2022 10:13 AM, Will Martin wrote:
>> I’d like a clarification. I sometimes have false memories, so I won’t assume that my memory that {HochHom X} would be plural (more than half of whole 0items in the group of items called X) and {X HochHom} would be singular (more than half of one item called X). When before the noun, I thought {HochHom} behaved grammatically like a number, and when following the noun, it acted more like a second noun in a noun-noun construction. I thought that {Hoch} worked the same way.
> We've seen Hoch X and we've seen X HochHom, but I don't think we've seen HochHom X. More in a minute on X Hoch.
> 
> We know the rules for Hoch X because Okrand told them to us. Hoch X means each X, taken individually when X has no plural suffix on it, and it means all X's, taken collectively when X has a plural suffix on it. You can call this "grammatically like a number" if you like, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
> 
> We've seen X HochHom in canon and its use seems obvious. It means most of X, the majority of X. You can think of it as more like a noun-noun construction than a number if you like. I'm not sure the distinction of "like a number" and "like a noun-noun construction" is necessarily mutually exclusive or useful — that is, I wouldn't want to assign any predictive power to a declaration of being in one category or the other.
> 
> We have, for example, the phrase Hoch botlh in paq'batlh, which doesn't mean each center; it's being used as a noun-noun construction, because the translation is center of all.
> 
> As for X Hoch, we have an example of that in paq'batlh:
> 
> jIlay'DI' reH batlh jIpabchugh
>     Qapla'meywIj Hoch vIta'ta' 'e' DaHar'a'
>     quv vuv nuv pagh ghajbogh neH
> 
> Did you think that my word of honor
>     Would have carried me this far?
>     Honor is for those with nothing to lose!
> 
> I interpret Qapla'meywIj Hoch as all my successes, to correspond to the English this far. It seems to be exactly identical in meaning to Hoch Qapla'meywIj. The grammar here remains unexplained. All 21 other instances of Hoch in paq'batlh follow known rules.
> 
> 
> 
>> I’m guessing this is similar to numbers in general, since {vagh X} is five Xs, but {X vagh} is a specific item from a group of items called {X}, so that numbers indicate degree of plurality when preceding nouns, and describe a specific, singular noun when they follow it.
> I wouldn't assume this is parallel. I wouldn't set up a guess as a parallel in order to be able to use the guess as the basis for predicting correct grammar.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
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