tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 25 23:27:59 1997

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Compound Nouns



ja' peHruS:
>You all know how I, peHruS, feel about allowing complex (perhaps a better
>word here than compound) nouns to come into existence from differing parts of
>speech.  Therefore, I challenge KLI experts to prove why we have chosen to
>compound nouns only from the noun-noun construction.  Did I miss something
>the founding fathers  and mothers wrote when HolQeD first began to be
>published?  Just because I can find no prohibition anywhere in TKD for using
>parts of speech other than nouns to construct new nouns, though I, too, found
>evidence for connecting nouns, can someone else point out to me where you
>found such a  prohibition?

TKD 3.4. The noun-noun construction:
    "Some combinations of two (or more) nouns in a row are so
    common as to hve become everyday words.  These are the
    compound nouns (as discussed in section 3.2.1)."

It's the only description of how to make compound nouns.  Section 3.2.3
also speculates that the complex nouns that are not obvious compounds of
this type or noun-wI' "...probably at one time were formed by combinding
simple nouns, but one or all of the nouns forming the complex noun are no
longer in use, so it is not possible...to know what the individual pieces
mean."  Note specifically that it suggests that the oddball complex nouns
still came from putting *nouns* together.

It's still possible that words like {Saqghom} weren't made this way, and
that {Saq} never was a noun.  But we know that some present-day Klingon
words came about by "random" factors and not by productive grammatical
rules.  (Consider {qa'meH}, which defies simple grammatical analysis.)
Maybe {Saqghom} is a lexicalized shortened form of {SaqmeH ghom}, maybe
not. Even if it is, we can't go around using "shorthand" Klingon and
expect to be understood clearly.

-- ghunchu'wI'




Back to archive top level