I should have "verb of speech," because that's what Okrand
called it in his interview with Will Martin in HolQeD
7:4. His first statement is "Verbs of speech are 'say' verbs,
like jatlh and ja'." Then
he says that, unlike the English tendency to attach any old
verb to a quotation, Klingon doesn't do that:
In English, we say, "Give me
some water," he said. "Give me some water," he pleaded. "Give
me some water," he yelled. [...] I think that's an English
thing to do. That's not a Klingon thing to do. In Klingon, you
jatlh and you ja'. That's
about it. The guard asked the prisoner a question. He replied.
He said, "[gestures a quotation he never quite made]"
He later admits that there may be other verbs of speech,
but that they're few. "The way I see I see the verbs of
speech, there may be more than just ja' and
jatlh, but there is only a small number of
words, unlike English."
And the bulk of this section of the article is Okrand
explaining to Martin that verbs of speech in the 'e'-less
sentence-as-object construction are used to report direct
quotations.
So does that mean ghugh might also be a
verb of speech? Yeeeesssss, if you ignore that ghugh
is explicitly not speech. If you consider "verbs of quotation"
to be a better term to describe them, you still need to
demonstrate that ghugh is not among all the
other words that Okrand explicitly blocked from being verbs of
speech, mostly giving their English translations: tlhob,
qoy', jach, chel, jang, and that it is one of the
few that Okrand wasn't even sure existed.
So all of that is a lot of guesswork and looking at things
sideways to get to ghugh being a verb of
speech, which is why I said "I wouldn't make that assumption"
and not "You can't do that." Hey, it DOES sound like ghugh
could be the "verb of animal noises" equivalent to "verbs of
speech," but we don't KNOW that.
As for who called ghugh a verb of speech:
loghaD did, just not with that term:
I would assume that this word can be used similarly to
jatlh:
ghugh vIghro' 'Imyagh.
'Imyagh, ghugh vIghro'.
"The v'gro goes 'Imyagh."
He's talking about verbs of speech. He assumed; I said I
wouldn't make that assumption.