Just out of curiosity, what kinds of "noun series" modelled along variations of beyHom bey bey'a' would also feel right or wrong to you (and other Klingonists reading this)?
- Using a -Hom/-0/-'a' series in a non-direct-object role, e.g.: Qe' chu' luSuchtaH ghomHom ghom ghom'a' "Bigger and bigger crowds visited the new restaurant; the new restaurant drew ever-increasing crowds."
Works for me. I don't think its position in the sentence has any
bearing on how it's interpreted.
- Using a different set of suffixes that suggest some other kind of spectrum, e.g.: qa'qoq qa'Hey qa' qa'na' vIleghtaH "I was dismissive of the idea at first but I am increasingly certain that I'm seeing an actual spirit." (This is an awkward translation.)
I don't see these as a spectrum, and these suffixes don't express
what I thought of the nouns at the time; they tell what I think of
them when I say the sentence. At best I would interpret this as my
seeing something someone called a spirit but wasn't, then
something I think was a spirit, then a spirit, then something that
was definitely a spirit. I'm seeing different things in sequence.
But there's no natural interpretation of these as a sequence, so
my instinct would be add a conjunction afterward and explain the
sequence separately.
- Not using the same base noun but with a series implied anyway, e.g.: jajlo' po pov tlhom puH DujDaj tI'taH "He worked on his car from dawn to dusk." (This example also uses a non-direct-object series, in this case a series of timestamps.)
Because the sequence is obvious, I could accept this. I would
expect this to be received something like "jajlo' (ok)
po (all morning, huh?) pov (wow, long time!) tlhom
(still going?!) puH DujDaj tI'taH.
- Nouns that only imply a series in context: 'awje' qa'vIn wornagh DItlhutlhtaH "We started with 'root beer', then had coffee, and then we drank warnog."
Same reaction as with the time stamps. 'awje' (ok) qa'vIn
(still going?) wornagh (wow, all that?!) DItlhutlhtaH.
But this one really wouldn't make any difference if you conjoined
them with je: the sense of sequence is not very strong.
But none of these strikes me as so simply unambiguous as the
howl-crescendo. You have to work at interpreting them. Stringing
along nouns isn't just a listed sequence; it's a single concept
expressed in a sequence of related words. The concept isn't
"sequence"; it's "thing that changes in this sequential way."
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name