On May 13, 2019, at 10:56, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

In other words, the {-'e'} in a pronoun-as-copula “to be” sentence is not just a topic marker in Standard Klingon. It’s a necessary part of the pronoun-as-copula formula. So it’s probably not a good idea to treat it like it’s just a topic marker, and it’s very unlikely that {vIghro' tIQ'e' nov 'oH} and {nov 'oH vIghro' tIQ'e'} are equivalent expressions apart from a marked stylistic difference of word order.

Except we're explicitly told otherwise in TKD:

puqpu' chaH qama'pu''e' As for the prisoners, they are children.
pa'DajDaq ghaHtaH la''e' As for the commander, he is in his quarters.

The -'e' may be required, but it still indicates a topic.

Right, I didn’t mean to say it isn’t a topic marker. It certainly is. I said it’s not *just* a topic marker, in the sense that it is more than simply a topic marker, because it seems to serve some additional purpose that speakers of {ta' Hol} find necessary and Morskan speakers do not.

But maybe I’ve been thinking about it backwards, and it’s just that Morskan speakers see the mandatory topicalization as redundant for some reason or another. It probably fits better with how the one known non-phonetic and non-lexical difference between Morskan and {ta' Hol} is described.