tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 07 20:43:13 2004

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Re: KLBC {X-Hom X X-'a'}

QeS lagh ([email protected])



ghItlhpu' De'vID:

>But there's no relationship between <vera'ngan>, <Human>, and <tlhIngan>
>the way there is with <beyHom>, <bey>, <bey'a'>.

teH. But I was theorising about the nature and origin of it. There's no 
relationship between the verbs in the sentence {bogh tlhInganpu', SuvwI' 
moj, Hegh} either, but it still shows a sequence.

I'm not so worried about the content of the words as separate units 
(although it seems that that has something to show, too), but the way they 
grammatically combine. The fact that three bare nouns appear without a 
conjunction (and with plural verb agreement) seems to roughly parallel the 
way the verbs appear without conjunctions in the TKW proverb. Both 
constructions seem to show the same sort of temporal sequence, too. But it 
would seem that this is a very special case, and everyone seems to agree on 
that.

>Now, if you had said
><jaghHom jagh jagh'a' HoH>, I would understand that as a poetic way of
>saying "He killed all his enemies" (as might occur in a Klingon poem,
>perhaps _The Fall of Kang_ by G'Trok).  In fact, I rather like that.  Along
>the same vein as translating <beyHom bey bey'a'> as "crescendo" (i.e.
>voices increasing in loudness), <jaghHom jagh jagh'a'> might be waves of
>ever-more-difficult/hated enemies, such as one encounters in a video game.

True. That's an interesting way of saying "he killed all his enemies". In 
poetry, a construction like this might appear more often than it does in 
everyday Klingon. (In fact, I'm writing some stuff at the moment on possible 
Klingon epic poetry methods, perhaps for future inclusion in HolQeD - would 
you mind if I used that?)

>But as others have said, there's no indication that this is a common
>structure that can be used willy-nilly.

Again, that's not what I'm looking for. I was speculating on origin, not on 
how the construct is used now. The very rarity of the formation surely has 
to say something about its applicability. As I said to ngabwI', this smacks 
of the headless relative device; we should know how to interpret it, but 
perhaps we shouldn't use it ourselves.

ngermeyrajmo' Satlho'. Savan,

QeS lagh

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