tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 29 00:53:16 1996
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Is {HoD ghaH matlh'e'} emphatic?
- From: "A.Appleyard" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Is {HoD ghaH matlh'e'} emphatic?
- Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 08:52:57 GMT
- Organization: Materials Science Centre
- Priority: normal
People have wondered whether e.g. {HoD ghaH matlh'e'} is emphatic or not, i.e.
"Maltz is captain" or "Maltz, rather than another, is captain". This use of an
originally emphatic construction as general usage has happened in English: (a)
"I write" is ordinary, (b) "I do write" is emphatic, and their interrogative
forms were (c) "write I?" and (d) "do I write?" respectively; but (c) has
become obsolete, and (d) is now general usage as ordinary. HolQeD somewhere
theorizes that in tlhIngan Hol in ancient times every consonant was followed
by a vowel. Thus perhaps in ancient times {HoD# matlh#} could mean "Maltz is
captain" or "the captain's Maltz" or "Captain Maltz", these meanings being
distinguished by the now-vanished distinctive inflectional vowel endings # #
(which also thus allowed more flexible word order); but when these endings
vanished and these constructions all fell together as {HoD matlh}, people had
to (be stricter with word order and) always use the emphatic construction {HoD
ghaH matlh'e'} for clarity when a sentence was meant. Perhaps ancient tlhIngan
Hol did have a verb "be", whose stem was only a vowel (here {@}); "he was
captain" was once something like {HoD# ghaH# @pu'#} which gradually contracted
to modern {HoD ghaHpu'}; but e.g. non-emphatic "when Maltz was captain"
**{HoD# matlh# @pu'#DI'#} became **{HoD matlhpu'DI'} with the verb endings
getting stuck to a noun, which was too confusing, so they resorted to the
originally emphatic form {HoD ghaHpu'DI' matlh'e'} instead.