On 1/28/2018 1:09 AM, nIqolay Q wrote:
On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 10:19 PM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name <mailto:sustel@trimboli.name>> wrote:
The fierceness with which people desire a /y'all/ in Klingon horrifies me. This is no different. There is no fundamental need to express this with a built-in phrase.
There is a "y'all". It's *tlhIH*. (Now, if someone wanted something for "all y'all"...)
There is no /all/ implicit in *tlhIH.* It plural you, but not necessarily all of you.
I disagree with the underlying idea here that not fundamentally needing a certain phrase or construction means it's not worth being ever used or discussed.
Oh nonono, I never said that. I have no problem with discussing the issue or occasionally needing to make explicit how much of *maH* (or *tlhIH*) one is talking about; see my subsequent discussion of what it would look like if you used it. I object to the casual translation of English /we all/ (or /y'all/) with a set phrase everywhere it appears. This is what mayqel threatened to do, and I'm pretty sure he's planning on using it in lieu of /ever/ using a straight *maH.*
/Assuming/ this were something we wanted to say, I would expect it to be *maH Hoch,* not *Hochmaj.* Consider what we discover in KGT with area phrases (like *jIH 'em */area behind me,/ not **'emwIj*).
Why would you expect *maH Hoch* based on that? I admit that *Hochmaj* looks unusual, but *Hoch* is a grammatical noun and can presumably take noun suffixes. (We know it can take *-Hom*.) The only situation we know of where the *maH X* phrasing is explicitly preferred to the *Xmaj* phrasing is with area nouns, and *Hoch* is not an area noun. (And some area nouns like *'ev*, *chan*, and *tIng* do take possessive suffixes, even in *ta' Hol*.)
Because *maH Hoch* appears to derive its meaning from the genitive noun-noun construction, not from possession. I don't think the area nouns work with pronouns the way they do because they are an exception to the rule; I think they work that way because they use a more general genitive way than possession. *jIH 'em:* it's not /my area behind;/ it's /the area behind /narrowed down with /me/ as a descriptor. I don't possess the area. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name