tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 17 19:39:40 1994
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Re: Accidents...
- From: [email protected] (Ken Beesley)
- Subject: Re: Accidents...
- Date: Sat, 18 Jun 1994 13:37:51 --100
>>>>
I gather ghu is baby, and ghu' situation. Correct me if not.
BTW, how would one say diminutive baby? ghuoy? With two vocals together?
Or is there somewhere a rule covering that? <<<
TKD, p. 174 (with original parentheses, talking about oy):
"(Though there are no examples, it is suspected that for those
few nouns which end in a vowel, ' is inserted before this
suffix.)"
Looking at the language phonologically, such an insertion would
indeed be suspected by any linguist. Klingon syllables just don't start with
vowels. This is also a common limitation in human languages,
including Arabic where initial glottal stops are inserted
(i.e. pronounced) epenthetically as necessary and are even represented in
the orthography with 'alif.
Assuming that the diminutive of ghu would be ghu'oy, I wrote a simple
rule in my morphological analyzer (HolQeD 1:2) to insert it. So if
you ask the system to generate ghu + oy, it produces ghu'oy. Same
for ghu' + oy. The surface word ghu'oy is therefore ambiguous.
If you analyze ghu'oy you get back both ghu + oy (baby + diminutive)
and ghu' + oy ( situation + diminutive). I cited ghu as the
prime example--diminutives are used a lot in human babytalk, and
we might naturally expect the same in Klingon.
*ghuoy receives no analysis. If we get further clarification about
oy and glottal stops, the rule can be changed or deleted as necessary.
It is a shame that Okrand couldn't run this example past his informant.
Ken