tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 03 09:00:50 1993

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-Ha'



There was some discussion about "-Ha'" before, with "muSHa'" and the like,
and I recently had occasion to use it to coin a possibly iffy verb.  So
Here's my take on it, to open a bit of a discussion.

Near as I can tell, "-Ha'" corresponds rather nicely (and I hope you'll
forgive me for yet again brining in other languages) to two prefixes in
Esperanto ("mal-" and "mis-", for those who know).  Much of the problem
with using it stems from the fact that these represent two separate
meanings, both of which are covered by "-Ha'".

The first meaning ("mal-"), which I'll call the "opposite" meaning, is the
sense in which "-Ha'" turns a concept into one which is in some sense its
diametric opposite.  So we have "par" for "dislike" and "parHa'" for
"like"; "Qey" for "be tight" and "QeyHa'" for "be loose", "tungHa'",
"jotHa'", "qImHa'", "naDHa'", "lobHa'", "belHa'", "ghomHa'", "tuQHa'moH",
"voqHa'", "yepHa'" and "yuDHa'" are the canonical words from the
dictionaries that seem to use this meaning.  There's something of a
spectrum here, so perhaps you might not place all these words under this
rubric, but that's okay.  This seems to be the more productive of the uses
in terms of words in the lexicon we have, at any rate, and that makes
sense in terms of the comparison: "mal-" is extremely productive in
Esperanto.

The other meaning ("mis-"), which I'll call the "failure" meaning, is the
sense in which "-Ha'" indicates that whatever was done was done wrongly or
badly.  In a sense this may have some overlap with "-chu'be'".  The only
word in the lexicon which seems to use this is "yajHa'" or "misinterpret",
but we also have the sample sentence in Section 4.3 involving
"bIjatlhHa'chugh" for "if you say the wrong thing/misspeak" (alongside such
examples as "yIchu'Ha'", etc., which are of "opposite" meaning).  So this
is plainly productive also, at least in usage (recall that Klingon, as an
agglutinative language, wouldn't have all its words in the dictionary,
since they get coined at need by sticking together word-elements), if not
in the lexicon we have.

Still, this leads us to the problem of which meaning should you understand
when you see it?  Like most situations in languages, the answer is probably
"whichever one works best in context", since if the speakers really saw
these meanings as so different and mutually exclusive, they probably
wouldn't make them share a suffix.  Nonetheless, there are heuristics that
you can apply (and that native speakers probably would apply to some extent
as well) upon seeing a suffix like "-Ha'" in an unfamiliar construction
(some compound words get fossilized and sort of take on a life of their own
when used enough, but we'll leave those out of consideration).  I would
guess that the "opposite" meaning is probably the more productive of the
two, speaking very generally.  Moreover, you can sometimes get a feel by
looking at the root.  What's the "opposite" of "jatlh"?  Nothing terribly
meaningful; perhaps close to "tam", but not even that.
"Maldiri"/"malparoli" is something I wouldn't expect to see in Esperanto
outside of a poem.  But "to misspeak" is a very accessible concept.

"chu'" is a bit trickier, since if you can "engage" something, you can
"disengage" it, and you could also "engage it badly".  Here the heuristic
of "opposite is more productive" helps, implying that a tentative
assignment to "disengage" is probably better.  "To engage badly" would more
likely be "chu'chu'be'" (eep, what a word), unless the context made it
clear in other ways.

Which leads me to the usage I put "-Ha'" to.  I needed a word for "to
vomit" (in this case, to vomit something in particular, in case that alters
your thinking).  To my dismay, I couldn't find one.  I'd bet, and hope,
that Klingon would have a simple root for this, but, well, it wasn't there.
I went with "SopHa'", for reasons as above (I understand that "malmangxi"
exists in Esperanto slang as either "to vomit" or "to defecate", if you
want the comparison).

This was sort of intended to start a little discussion on the wonderful
world of "-Ha'".  Any comments?

~mark



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