Note that Klingon, as we know it, is a spoken language with a written language that Maltz has not deciphered for us. The Romanized alphabet we use is a phonetic representation of what is spoken, as is the punctuation. So far as we know pIqaD has no punctuation.

So, we can argue about the change of meaning if we omit a comma, but in doing so, it’s a purely academic argument, since Klingon doesn’t really have commas. We impose commas on what we write and give meaning to those commas. There are no commas in the written Klingon in TKD. There are no question marks. All questions in Klingon are marked by grammatical markers or fixed phrasing among the words. We feel more comfortable when we add question marks because we like punctuation. Similarly, commas can disambiguate which clause a noun between two verbs is participating in, but that’s just something we made up. Maltz never told us that.

So, we shouldn’t get too hung up on how a sentence would be reinterpreted IF WE DROPPED THE COMMA.

Because there are no commas in Klingon, so far as we know. We just add them for clarity, because in the languages we are more accustomed to, that’s what commas do.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.

On Apr 12, 2019, at 9:26 AM, Jeffrey Clark <jmclark85@gmail.com> wrote:

Syntactically I don’t know wha dropping the comma and making a proper name into the direct object would mean — names as second-person DO’s isn’t part of the Klingon grammar AFAIK. I agree with SuStel, that a proper name can’t be a second person DO, it has to be apposition or direct address; but maybe Klingon has rules for that which matlh hasn’t given us.

Semantically, I’d read it as if the comma was there.

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 12, 2019, at 09:06, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:

hmm.. Interesting..

So, if I removed the comma, writing {SuStel qagheljaj}, then would it stop being direct address and turn into an object ?

~ m. qunen'oS
ca'non holy ca'non
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