On 5/7/2019 3:27 PM, Jeffrey Clark wrote:

Except qar'a' is a recognized feature of the language, while qarbe''a' is not. I don't think Klingons who hear qar'a' are thinking that it means is it correct? It would come across to them more like amiright? It's a thing you say, not a sentence to be parsed.

While I agree that Klingon’s likely don’t parse it that way intuitively, the idiomatic understanding is clearly derived from it’s literal meaning.

 qarbe’’a’ is both grammatical and parseable — if not commonly heard as an idiomatic expression. Likely {muj’a’} would be more direct; but playing on {qar’a’}, the {qarbe’’a’} seems like it would signal the asker’s increased doubt rather than uncertainty — shades of meaning.

Yes. But a Klingon hearing qarbe''a' would not simply reverse the sense of qar'a'; he or she would have to parse it as a separate sentence, and so their alertness would be raised. The two are not, I think, as interchangeable as your post suggests.

Without a word from Okrand otherwise, one could not, for instance, correctly say De' Sov qarbe''a' HoD, but one CAN say De' Sov qar'a' HoD The captain knows the information, right?

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name