tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 21 10:26:27 1998

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Re: pab mu'mey

: <<chuvmey>> bolIjlaw'. Okrand tells us that Klingon linguists
: consider there to be three kinds of words: nouns, verbs and
: left-overs. He gave us words for all three. You want terms to
: classify words into subtypes Klingon linguists apparently do
: not consider.
: 
: charghwI'

We don't know that.  If DIp, wot and chuvmey are sufficient, then pray tell
me why they also use the terms lengwI', moHaq and *both* mojaq & mojaQ?
(Are affixes considered chuvmey I wonder?)  The fact that Maltz didn't
happen to tell his Federation interrogators the words for "pronoun" and
"adverbial" doesn't mean there aren't any, just that they didn't make it
into the relatively small vocabulary of tlhIngan Hol words published in what
Okrand repeatedly calls only a "sketch" of the grammar.  I would be
astonished if Klingon grammarians did not have specialized terms for the
various chuvmey, not to mention other language-related phenomena.  Until we
learn what they are, I see nothing wrong in using our own words on this
listserv in the interim, so long as we agree amongst ourselves.

We knew for a long time that Klingons had a musical form that translates as
"opera" in Federation Standard, but it wasn't until KGT that we learned what
they call it themselves.  At which point, we dropped all the other coinings
proposed by various Klingonists and started using ghe'naQ.

Areas I'd like to know more about:  Do Klingons "conjugate" verbs?  We've
observed there are two types of wot that behave differently: action and
stative verbs, or what Okrand calls "qualities".  How do Klingon grammarians
distinguish the two?  How many types of nouns are there?  We can create
subsets consisting of names (pong), ranks (patlh), etc., but do Klingons do
this sort of classification?  

Maltz was, I believe, a science officer so his knowledge of grammatical
terminology may be somewhat vague.  We need to find a linguist or poet to
interrogate.  I wonder if Keedera is available?

Voragh

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