tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Mar 10 21:16:26 1996

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Re: Time (Out)

charghwI' writes:
>Has it ever been established that {'Iv} can be used as a verb?
>[...]
>If the oddity of Okrand's using both word orders (SoH 'Iv} and
>{'Iv SoH} in various places is cause to conclude that {'Iv} is
>being used as the verb, well, I would tend to just think Okrand
>wasn't really careful about this one and did not necessarily
>intend to give free reign to the use of the question word as a
>verb.

That indeed is the example that I had in mind when I referred to
accepting {'Iv} as a pronoun/"to be" verb.  There must inevitably
come a time when we stop accepting every example from Marc Okrand
as canon.  We already do that to some extent when we discount the
obvious mistakes like {cha'maH wa' rep} for noon, or a blatantly
mispronounced syllable.  But the repeated oddities, like "wrong"
placement of the subject in a ritual toast, or showing indirect
objects with verb prefixes, still carry the force of grammatical
law.  Because of their strangeness and contradiction of the rules
as originally presented, I prefer to use the older forms instead
of the apparently equally valid "shorthand" constructions.  But I
will not, and can not, ignore the {SoH 'Iv} and {Dochvam nuq}
examples from Conversational Klingon.

-- ghunchu'wI'               batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj

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