tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 29 19:57:30 2007

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Basic grammar question

Alan Anderson ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

ja' QeS 'utlh:

> From my understanding of Klingon grammar, an explicit noun on its  
> own should condition third-person agreement on the verb, and we  
> have no canon that indicates otherwise. I find {maleng qorDu'wIj}  
> (note the spelling) to be outright ungrammatical.

I agree that the rule of {rom} ("accord", not "concord", if I recall  
correctly) strongly discourages something like {maleng qorDu'wIj}.   
But I'm not quite prepared to dismiss it without further  
consideration.  The more I think about it, the more it seems to mesh  
with my internalized Klingon grammar.  I suppose I can try to explain  
it this way:  it feels to me like the verb prefix coerces the  
otherwise third-person noun into expressing a first-person meaning.

It seems similar to "we students" (or "we band of brothers") in  
English.  Formally, it could perhaps be seen as apposition, with the  
actual pronoun elided but understood from the verb prefix.  For many  
situations with a first-person subject, the subject pronoun is given  
only for explicit emphasis anyway.

I'm not going to start saying things that way, and I'm certainly not  
going to promote such usage, but after playing with the concept for a  
while in my head, I'm pretty sure I won't cringe -- or even blink --  
when I encounter it.

-- ghunchu'wI'

Back to archive top level