tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 19 22:34:21 2001
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Re: QamvIS Hegh, torvIS yIn
[QamvIS Hegh qaq law, torvIS yIn qaq puS.]
ja' SuStel:
>This is a really weird sentence. What is it doing? Are /Hegh/ and /yIn/
>nouns or verbs? If nouns, the law'/puS construction isn't too strange, but
>the you've got a subordinate clause modifying a noun, not a verb.
They're definitely nouns. I believe {Hegh} as a noun appears in TKD's
addendum, showing that it was added in that sense for ST6.
ja' Voragh:
>Although Okrand analyzed it as:
> "Dying while standing is preferable to living while kneeling"
>in TKW (p.95), it makes more sense to me viewing them as nouns:
> "Death while standing is preferable to life while kneeling"
"Dying" and "living" *are* nouns, aren't they?
>A better working explanation is that this proverb contains a survival of how
>{-vIS} worked in older Klingon, before Klingons started adding {-taH} to it,
>for reasons which are still unexplained.
My pet theory regarding this proverb is that the Type 9 verb suffix {-vIS}
is being used in a way similar to {-meH} when modifying nouns. But
whatever the underlying grammar, it's basically an exceptional case.
-- ghunchu'wI'