So if I interpret you correctly, you argue that Klingons themselves label some compounds as lexicalized as some as not, on a basis unknown to us. Then Okrand depicts this fictional lexicalization with the spaces.
I'm not going to repeat myself on the difference between native
grammar and convention. You're not understanding the distinction.
Outside the fiction of Klingon, I argue that all canon compounds (spaces or no spaces) in TKD, KGT and other dictionary listings are lexicalized, unless explicitly stated by Okrand that they are not. Spaces are not useful in this regard.
You and I use Klingon entirely outside of the fiction of Klingon,
but we pretend that we have a bridge to the inside, and we get all
our information about Klingon from across that bridge and only
from across that bridge. If we didn't, then there would be no
reason at all to care about what Okrand says about Klingon, and we
could all just make up whatever words and rules we liked. But
we're NOT inside that fiction ourselves. We can't go to Kronos and
meet Klingons; we can't make a subspace call to a Klingon planet;
we can't even hope to be invaded by Klingons in the future. We
have only that little fiction between studying an "alien" language
and arguing about a semi-joke language that some linguist threw
together as a novelty.
Even as things are, there are no Klingon Police that will come
and arrest you if you decide you want to shove nouns together. Go
right ahead. It would be an interesting test to see if others
would tolerate it.
I'm not promoting any particular alternative punctuation. I'm just saying that the current usage is not consistent and that there are possible ways to write consistently:
If you're expecting to find consistency in Klingon, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Much of the fun is in recognizing that we don't know and can't predict the answer and trying to figure it out.
You're saying that the current usage is not consistent. I completely agree. There are examples of compound nouns I wouldn't expect to be compounded, and examples of noun-nouns that I could easily imagine being compounded.
You're saying there are possible ways to write consistently. Again, I agree. We could make up our own rules to cover all situations. And we do have our own rules: we have developed a convention whereby we do not invent our own compounds, and any genitive nouns get a space before their head nouns; only Okrand can invent compounds. It's not always consistent with what Okrand has done, but as you AND Okrand both admit, Okrand himself hasn't been consistent.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name