tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 21 08:08:54 1997

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Re: New suffix in KGT



>Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 07:40:54 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Terrence Donnelly <[email protected]>
>
>I was surprised and pleased to see that Okrand has given us a >new verb suffix<:
>-la'/-luH, meaning "one can".  It should now be possible to translate things
>like {ghopDap yoS chIjla'bogh} "navigable asteroid field".  True, he says it's 
>slang and should be avoided unless the speaker is very comfortable with
>Klingon culture, but, hey, I'm feeling pretty comfortable with it, and I bet
>you are, too.

Comfortable with the language, yes.  But not with hearing that sort of
slang too much (as Okrand says: it's rare).  I also wouldn't go so far as
to call them "new verb suffixes".  Yes, you could use {ghopDap yoS
chIjla'bogh} (though I usually think one navigates a SHIP, not an asteroid
field), but probably not more than once or maybe twice in a conversation.

Using these suffixes is instantly marked as odd-sounding slang, and Okrand
says so.  It's sort of like if I were talking about thought or something,
and scrabbled for word and finally grinned and said "so first there's the
set of all... all... come-uppable ideas..."  OK, that's cute and it makes
my point and it's understood, but if I start using it as a regular term it
will start to sicken you ("Right, so I have one come-uppable idea, and you
think of two other come-uppable ideas, and tell me one of them, and I try
to compare your come-uppable idea with my come-uppable idea...."  Ugh).
This is actually not a bad analogy, I am starting to think.  It's a misuse
of grammar which we grin at and accept because it's the ungrammaticality
which makes things work... but you wouldn't use it formally, nor often.

>If Okrand is going to monkey with verb suffixes, I have a suggestion: use
>certain
>verbs as if they were suffixes.  Three prime canditates for me would be {neH},
>{Hech} (both as Type 2's) and {chaw'} (as a Type 5), so you could say things
>like:
>
>*qama' vIHoHneHbej   "I definitely want to kill the prisoner"
>*qama' vIHoHHechbej  "I definitely intend to kill the prisoner"
>*qama' vIHoHchaw'bej "I'm definitely allowed to kill the prisoner"
>
>He could call them recently discovered suffixes, youthful slang or an ad-hoc
>grammatical transgression like -la'/-luH.
>
>Well, just an idea from my wishlist...

Wish all you want... :)


~mark


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