tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 17 02:25:35 1997

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conjunctions



  BETWEEN CLAUSES		WITH NOUNS
  'ej C and			je O and
  qoj C and/or			joq O and/or
  pagh C either/or		ghap O either/or

  TKD gives these conjunctions. An article in an early HolQeD, speculating why
the peculiar reversal between the two forms, thought that the clause forms
were reduced from ancient reduplicated forms e.g. {ghapaghap}. But analogy
with Greek supplies an explanation that seems likelier to me.
  In Greek "and" is ({kai} between the nouns or clauses, which is irrelevant
here, or) the enclitic forms (= it is put one word after the position between
the nouns or clauses) {te} between nouns and {de} between clauses.
  The noun form {te} is similar to the Klingon noun form {je}, including in
its placing.
  With the clause form in Greek, if the clause after "and" starts with the
emphatic {e~} (~ = long vowel), the result is the combination {e~de} between
the clauses. Ancient Klingon may have done the same, producing *{'eje} or
similar from enclitic {je} after a now-disused initial particle {'e}.
  Various evidence from Klingon word order, e.g. constructions with words in
what would normally be the wrong order fossilized in toasts and the {law' -
puS} comparative, seem to show that in archaic Klingon word order was freer
and the nouns had now-lost Latin-style case endings to distinguish subject
from object from possessor etc. If so, then likely Klingon since then had a
period of general loss of final vowels, which would also have removed the
final {e} of *{'eje} = "and". The resulting apparent reversal {je : 'ej} then
spread by analogy to {joq} and {ghap}: in my experience "and" is needed much
more often than "or".


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