tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 08 06:25:52 2002
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KLBC: emphasis
I'm not really a KLB, but I could not answer to this question somebody asked me at the qepHom last
weekend.
it's about noun suffix {-'e'}.
1. thought:
TKD (p.29) says "This suffix emphasizes that the noun to which it is attached is the topic of the
sentence"
{De''e' vItlhapnISpu'} "I needed to get the INFORMATION" (not something else)
2. thought:
About "To Be-constructions" TKD (p.68) says
"If the subject is a noun, it follows the third-person pronoun and takes the -'e' topic suffix."
{puqpu' chaH qamapu''e'} "The prisoners are children."
----> Resulting question:
Can we make a combination of those two rules?
i.e. have two -'e' suffixes in a sentence.
Example:
{puqpu''e' chaH qamapu''e'}
"The prisoners are CHILDREN."
talking like TKD, this is translated as:
"As for the prisoners, they are children (and not something else)."
My opinion:
I don't know. On the one hand, thought #1 looks like you can only emphasize one noun, since there can
only be one topic in a sentence, don't it? On the other hand, thought #2 tells me that any "to-be"-
sentence needs the -'e' at the end.
Quvar.