lieven:

Basically, yes. It's just the rule.

Interesting. I didn't expect that though. I always thought there was some reason. Anyways, good to know. ~ m. qunen'oS In Ca'Non we trust

On Apr 26, 2019, at 06:04, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:

But that's not so much surprising, many languages follow the same system, even English does:

TLH: {loD tIn} - "tIn loD" EN: "Big man" - "The man is big." DE: "Großer Mann" - "Der Mann ist groß." FR: "le grand homme" - "L'homme est grand."

All of these languages have a few things different from Klingon: they all use copular verbs, they all have articles, and they all have adjectives (you can’t use the “big” word as a verb in any of these example languages). Also, I don’t see any reason you couldn’t say “l’homme grand” to mean “the big man” in French, in which case it’s precisely the “est” (for which Klingon has no equivalent) that makes the difference. For consistency, it might also be nice to use “the big man” and “der großer Mann” in these examples. Here’s a few more examples with languages that don’t share all of the features I mention above (for consistency with Quvar’s examples, I’m using definite articles when available. I’m also presenting multiple possibilities of how to express the same thing when they exist): Russian (no article, no copula verb in present tense, yes adjectives) «большой мужчина» (bol’shoy muzhchina; big man) a/the big man «мужчина большой» (muzhchina bol’shoy; man big) a/the man is big (but ALSO a/the big man) Arabic (yes article, no copula verb in present tense, yes adjectives) الرجل الكبير (ar-rajul al-kabir; the-man the-big) the big man الرجل كبير (ar-rajul kabir; the-man big) الرجل هو كبير (ar-rajul hua kabir; the-man he big) the man is big Tagalog (sort-of article, no copula verb, yes adjectives) ang malaking lalake; the big-(linker) man ang lalaking malaki; the man-(linker) big the big man (“ang” isn’t really a definite article, but it’s acting enough like one that I’ll gloss it that way.) ang lalake ay malaki; the man (subj./pred. separator) big malaki ang lalake; big the man the man is big At first glance, one might be tempted to say that Russian is like Klingon here, but that’s not really true, since мужчина большой can mean a/the man is big *or* a/the big man, depending on context. For example, if it is serving a syntactic role in a sentence such as subject or object, it can’t be a whole clause on its own, and is necessarily an adjective-modified noun phrase. Or if it’s serving as the answer to a question like какой мужчина - what kind of man, then it doesn’t mean “a man is big”, but rather “a big man”, since Russian shifts words towards the end of an expression to topicalize them. Sometimes you’ll see a hyphen used as punctuation to separate the subject and predicate «мужчина- большой», in which case it can only mean “a/the man is big”, but this disambiguating punctuation is not mandatory. The punctuation reflects non-phonetic features which disambiguate the two meanings when spoken, namely a pause between the two words, and usually a rising intonation at the end of the word before the pause. Anyway, I chose these languages because they all have “no copula verb” (at least in these examples) in common with Klingon, and all of Quvar’s examples used copula verbs in addition to word order. You’ll note that they all have some way to differentiate between the use of the adjective as a modifier and as a predicate. Russian relies mostly on prosody, since «мужчина большой» can mean either thing, but word order is also important since «большой мужчина» doesn’t really ever mean “the man is big”. Arabic uses the presence or lack of the definite article on the adjective, and/or a pronoun (kind of like Klingon does for “to be” constructions with nouns, except the pronoun is optional in Arabic), as well prosody. Without the definite article, prosody marks the difference between "رجل كبير" (rajul kabir; man big) meaning “a big man” and “a man is big”. Adding the pronoun to make “رجل هو كبير” (rajul hua kabir; man he big) is the only way I’m aware of to unambiguously mean “a man is big” in writing. I’m not aware of unambiguous ways to write “a man is big” in either Arabic or Russian. Tagalog uses linker particles to indicate when an adjective modifies a noun versus existing in a subject/predicate relationship with it. I have a vague feeling that there might be a subtle difference in meaning with the word order variations, but I can’t remember or articulate what that would be. Unfortunately, Klingon is the only language I’m familiar with that doesn’t have adjectives, so I can’t provide any examples of how other languages without adjectives make this distinction. But word order is as good of a way as any. This isn’t a reason for why it is this way, but it is an interesting feature to note: verbs of quality, by their nature, cannot take objects, so by putting a noun in the object position of a verb like {tIn} you are saying “this noun has a relationship with this verb, but it’s not a normal verbal relationship”. So {loD tIn} can’t mean anything where {tIn} is acting like a normal verb. So even if we never know the reason why it is so, we can at least know that the way it is can’t accidentally also be something else.