On Tue, May 28, 2019, 16:54 Jeffrey Clark <jmclark85@gmail.com> wrote:

Would the following construction be valid?

loD ghaHbe’ be’ ghaHbe’ je ghotvetlh’e’.

—jevreH

Since {loD ghaHbe'} and {be' ghaHbe'} are sentences, you'd need {'ej}; I think {loD ghaHbe' 'ej be' ghaHbe' ghotvetlh'e'} works, though of course I'm no expert.

I also don't know whether two "to be" sentences can share a subject/topic like that. It's an interesting question.

jatlh charghwI':

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>Yes, but they are ALIENS. They OBVIOUSLY are not men or women, even if they ARE male or female.

>That’s why I picked {rur} instead of a pronoun, since we know from describing colors and such that {rur} is used when you are comparing an aspect of something to another thing, even when the things themselves are not generally similar.

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novpu' maHmo', loD SoHbe' 'ej be' jIHbe', qar'a'?

But I do agree that a lot of the aspects of language are arbitrary; there's nothing about English-speaking culture that makes us need to mark tense on all our verbs, or put an article in front of all our singular nouns, for example. As John McWhorter says, language tends to ooch along like a lava lamp, and one usually can't predict what state it will ooch to next.

I had to stop listening to John McWhorter; he doesn't study linguistics so much as push a linguistic agenda.

There's nothing that makes us need to mark tense on all our verbs, but there are historical reasons that we do. It didn't arise out of nothing.

Languages evolve in very much the same way that species evolve. There's nothing that makes us need to have an appendix on our large intestine, but there are good reasons we have one. It's very disadvantageous that the left recurrent laryngeal nerve loops all the way down and under the aortic arch, but there's a reason so many animals have this anatomy. It's not arbitrary. It may not be useful to us, but it's not arbitrary.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name