On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 9:22 AM SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
Ungrammatical. No, there's no rule against it, but it's obviously not said this way. The *chaH* is NOT the verb *are.* It's the pronoun *they, them.* In Klingon, pronouns are not verbs, even when they are the center of a copula sentence.
I'm not sure it's quite so clearly defined as that. Copula pronouns can take verbal suffixes, after all. And we know from the latest qepHom ( http://www.qephom.de/book/qepHom2019_p_21.jpg) that not all Klingons analyze words into distinct parts of speech the same way. It's possible that a Klingon might consider *chaH* to be both a pronoun and a verb, in the same way that some people analyze *ret* as both a noun and a verb in different contexts. To me, *jaghpu' chaH chaH'e'* doesn't feel ungrammatical so much as redundant or a bit clumsy, like the speaker missed some shorter way to express the same idea. If *chaH* *is* conceived of solely as a pronoun, I wonder if something like *jaghpu' chaH'e'* would work to emphasize/topicalize it.