As you become more and more experienced in speaking Klingon, you may discover that your Klingon sentences tend to contain a larger concentration of verbs than your English sentences.

For example:

English: The patient's illness was brought on by sleeplessness. (1 verb, 3 nouns)
Klingon: QonglaHbe'mo' SID ropchoH. (2 verbs, 1 noun)
Back-translated: Because the patient couldn't sleep, she/he became sick.

However, every now and then, it is useful to be able to describe an action or a state using a noun rather than a verb. For example, what if you wish to say his so-called sleeplessness, or the illness that was caused by her sleeplessness?

This is where the useful—but rarely heard—nominalization suffix -ghach comes in. This suffix takes a verb which has at least one other verb suffix and turns it into a noun that describes the action or state corresponding to that verb. For example:

Further reading

You can read more about the -ghach suffix in The Klingon Dictionary, in section 4.2.9. of the addendum.

Advanced students may also be interested in this HolQeD article, which explores the tricky subject of using -ghach on a naked verb stem (i.e. *nobghach) or on a verb with a pronominal prefix (i.e. *jInobghach). This, however, is beyond the scope of this course.