I think SuStel’s analysis is perfectly rational and probably correct, though we probably don’t have specific canon to be 100% sure that {Hoch} works like this when combined with a noun with a verb used adjectivally. I’d probably replace “all-ness” with “whole” for clarity in the English explanation, since it’s a more commonly used English word that means the same thing, but “all-ness” works just fine.
I used the word all-ness specifically to avoid problems
with the interpretation of the word all, which is
both noun and adjective in English. (The word whole has
the same problem.) Of course all-ness isn't what you'd
actually say in English; that's not the point. It illustrates the
meaning of the Klingon better, that's all. Once explained, you can
go back to a normal translation. mayqel wasn't looking for a
clearer English translation; he was asking for the difference
between two Klingon phrases, and the difference between their
translations the whole big pie and the big whole pie
doesn't illustrate which is correct.
The TKD gloss doesn’t contain either “whole” or “all-ness” and boQwI’ offers no canon examples of {Hoch} following another noun. I think I remember that Okrand’s explanation of how {Hoch} works when following a noun used the word “whole”, but my memory is imperfect, net Sov.
paq'batlh:
chalqachlIj rachlu'ta'bogh tutDaq
mol'egh betleH
muptaHvIS tay''eghmoH QeHDaj HochThe bat'leth sunk into the post
Of your fortified tower,
All his rage focused in one blow
The relevant phrase is QeHDaj Hoch all his rage.
Okrand explained what Hoch means preceding a noun, but
not what it means following a noun. We also have HochHom following
a noun to mean most of the noun. We also understand what a
noun-noun construction means: the second noun is the thing you're
talking about, and the first noun is narrowing its sense to the
set of things described by itself. chab Hoch is all
as a noun, or all-ness, and the chab means that
the all-ness is that subset of all-ness that has
to do with pies. It is pie-allness. It is all of the pie.
It's not the pie itself; it's the all-ness of the pie, the
wholeness of the pie.
If you want to be 100% safe against Okrand later surprising us by invalidating this very reasonable interpretation of what {Hoch} does when combined with an adjective, you can dodge the entire issue by using the adjective as a verb with {-bogh}, as in {tInbogh chab Hoch}.
This is true, but probably not necessary. If you accept Hoch
being modified by the noun phrase tInbogh chab, I see no
reason why you wouldn't accept Hoch being modified by the
noun phrase chab tIn. Throughout all of Klingon, noun
phrases participate in the grammar exactly as single nouns do.
Both are simply following known rules.
Okrand has used this mechanism for expressing adjectives in the past to avoid overloading grammatical constructions he prefers to keep simple, like using multiple adjectives on the same noun,
We don't know that he did that to keep things simple. He may have done it because he decided that's the way it is done: one verb modifier per noun (or noun phrase). We don't know this is a rule, because you can't show usage evidence for a negative rule, and Okrand hasn't declared any such rule. We've just never seen this happen. But the fact that we get things like SuDbogh Dargh 'ej wovbogh instead of Dargh SuD wov or Dargh SuD 'ej wov suggests that multiple verbs might not be allowed to modify a noun. It just suggests it. It certainly doesn't give us Okrand's thinking, so we can't extend Okrand's thinking that he didn't tell us to other areas.
and to some extent, {Hoch} following a noun is very nearly behaving like an adjective. It’s behaving like an adjective as much as any noun can do. It’s a whole pie, not a half pie, and the word order tells us it’s not “all pies”.
I said to think of Hoch as all-ness because all can be a noun or an adjective in English (and so can whole), and using all keeps the correct word order obscure. I used all-ness purely to force the word into noun form, so that the correct meaning of each word order was unambiguous for illustration purposes.
In other words, the English translation confuses the meaning of
what is a fairly straightforward Klingon noun-noun construction.
We’re pretty sure you can’t say *chab tIn ‘ey*, but you can say {tInbogh chab ‘ey} or {‘eybogh chab tIn} or use two or more adjectives with {-bogh}, though I don’t trust myself to get that right without studying the canon first. [Something like {Xbogh, Ybogh je SuvwI’} faintly echoes in my mind.]
That last construction only occurs in one song, and doesn't
follow known rules. Instead, we can say tInbogh chab 'ej
'eybogh or tInbogh 'ej 'eybogh chab. I'm not sure if
the form of tInbogh chab 'ey or 'eybogh chab tIn
has ever been used in canon, though it's perfectly grammatical.
However, it has issues of its own: is a tInbogh chab 'ey
a tInbogh chab that is 'ey or a chab 'ey
which is tIn? Is it [tInbogh chab] 'ey or tInbogh
[chab 'ey]? This might matter, as it tends to show which
quality is more tightly associated with the noun. What if you want
the qualities to be equally important to the noun?
The point here is that Okrand has avoided using two adjectives on one noun, preferring to keep the grammar simpler for forming that noun-adjective phrase, allowing only one adjective.
Again, you don't know his preferences or his reasons for not having adjectivally modified one noun with two verbs. You can't extrapolate new rules using this supposed preference.
Maybe this idea, which was not revealed to us until many years after TKD, also applies to {Hoch} following a noun, and Okrand hasn’t revealed this yet.
When was this idea revealed to us? So far as I know, this is just
a property of verbs of quality that we have deduced by their lack
of evidence and by the grammatical difficulties they would present
if allowed.
This is probably not the case, but it could be. We don’t know for sure, unless one of the canon masters can fill in important missing examples.
Until we're told that Hoch acts like an adjectival verb,
it would be perfectly reasonable to use it as the noun it is, just
the way Okrand has done.
As a matter of personal style, depending on which meaning you intended, I’d either use {Hoch chab tIn} [snip]
This means each big pie, which is clearly not what he
wanted.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name