lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:
Unless someone else has seen something I missed, we have no canon example of a speaking sentence introducing an entire dialog.
What actually led me to ask about this in the first place, was reading a text which wrote: "People were sitting and discussing.." And then, followed the dialogue. I know, one could write things like: wa'vaD jatlh latlh.. jatlh nuvpu'vam.. jatlh wa', 'ej jang latlh.. But once I thought the {ja'chuq}, I said to myself "what the jay' ? but we already *have* a verb meaning 'discuss, confer' so why not use it ?" If the ja'chuq is {ja'} with {-chuq}, then it would be pretty strange for it not to be able to introduce quotations. Of course one could argue - as you correctly pointed out- that "to introduce one sentence is one thing, but to introduce an entire dialogue is quite another". Perhaps.. But it would be weird to say that two people are {ja'chuq}ing and then follow with only one or two sentences. On the other hand though, I realize that lacking Ca'Non we can't really know for sure. As far as the {jatlhchuq} is concerned, again I realize that there is no Ca'Non to support it, but if we *can* say {qajatlhpu' HIghoS}, then why couldn't we say too {majatlhchuqpu'..} Although, now that I'm thinking this over, I don't know whether we've actually seen any Ca'Non using the prefix trick with {jatlh}, so perhaps this all approach has been wrong from the start. ~ mayqel qunen'oS