On 29 December 2016 at 16:05, Lawrence M. Schoen <klingonguy@gmail.com> wrote:
Readers of Schoen's fiction ask if elephants can really talk.
Translate any of the above or similar statements into Klingon and the group is clearly understood to be made up of language users and no one would blink twice at the figurative use of extending that attribute to the group.
In the case of something like "readers", they're clearly {laDwI'pu'} and it's not just metaphorical. They're literally beings capable of language.
Klingon has a few interesting cases where English uses a
group-word while Klingon just uses a plural word. The one that
occurs to me immediately is mebpa'mey hotel.
Grammatically in Klingon, this is just the plural of the word mebpa',
and is not a separate group-word. You could not, for instance,
call a major hotel a *mebpa'mey'a'. You could, however,
say mebpa'mey qach'a' great building of guest-rooms.
With the extra information you could even leave off the
now-unneeded plural suffix, for mebpa' qach'a'.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name