On 1/28/2018 1:09 AM, nIqolay Q wrote:
On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 10:19 PM, SuStel <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.
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SuStel
http://trimboli.name