tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 04 08:03:29 2002

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Re: tlhIngan Hol lujatlhbogh puq'e'

>>Actually, the term 'genitive' has been used on this list to describe
>>the function of the first noun in a noun-noun construction.  To slip
>>into the fiction of Klingon for a bit, I suspect that long ago,
>>there was a 'genitive' syntactic marker, and like the other
>>syntactic markers it was a Type 5 suffix.  This would explain why
>>nouns occupying that grammatical role can't take Type 5 suffixes -
>>it's a holdover from when those nouns had Type 5 suffixes of their
>>own.
>
>Sangqar,
>normally, t5-suffixes mark nouns that go into the header. it would
>have been a strange t5-suffix that doesn't need a "-bogh"-clause,
>wouldn't it?

Well, it was just conjecture, but if it were true, it would not have seemed 
strange to the Klingon speakers of that time perios, any more than 
Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Beowulf would have seemed starnge to their original 
audience.  I assume you're German; don't Martin Luther's writings sound a 
little odd to modern ears?  And yet to Germans of his day, they were 
perfectly normal (well, maybe they were a little more formal than most 
German of the day).

In the same way, this "Old Klingon" sounds strange to us, but would have 
been normal to Klingons at the time it was spoken.

For those who haven't been following this thread (and yet have read this far 
anyway), this "Old Klingon" is not referring to Okrand's no' Hol, but to a 
premise based completely upon conjecture, so don't get confused.

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