On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 12:13 AM Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
In Star Trek V, there’s a scene where tlha'a HoD says “'entepray''a'?” and it’s captioned in English as “Enterprise?” Surely, he wasn’t adding the type nine verb suffix “-'a'” to a noun, so what was he doing?

* Using the type one noun suffix “-'a'” to mean something like “The great Enterprise?”
* Referring to the “Enterprise-A” with registry number NCC-1701-A
* Momentarily forgetting proper grammar for a moment because he was so excited
* Using a dialect or slang where forming questions this way is allowed
* Adding the verb suffix “-'a'” to a noun, after all
* Some combination of some of the above possibilities
* Something else

Are there other examples where the interrogative marker is added to a noun for a similar kind of sentence fragment as a question? Has Maltz ever commented on this?

Contextually, it seems like it's supposed to be a question. "The Enterprise? Really?" My guess is that it's a slang construction, adding the interrogative verb suffix to a noun to ask whether something really is that noun. Maltz has never commented on it, so I assume it's not a particularly common sort of slang.

Is MO at the qepHom going on? Maybe someone there can ask him real quick.