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.