tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 15 03:30:51 2014

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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: Say'qu'moH

Rohan Fenwick ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

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<body class='hmmessage'><div dir='ltr'>ghItlhpu' loghaD, jatlh:<br>&gt; That being said, it's worth noting that we don't know for how long<br>&gt; the current suffix order has been in place; there was a time when<br>&gt; {ghIj qet jaghmeyjaj} was a valid sentence.<br><br>Well. It could also be argued that that is from a non-standard Klingon dialect, too ;) Unfortunately, the scant evidence from the paq'batlh contains only three instances of no' Hol where multiple suffixes appear, and two of those include rovers and so aren't of much help. The only one that is not is /tyemtoq'g'oty/ {chImtaHghach} "emptiness", which obeys modern suffix constraints (V-7-9).<br><br>Staying in no' Hol, though, I wonder if another possibility might be that {lo'laH} arose out of OSV word-ordering? If we reconstruct a no' Hol sentence such as the following:<br><br>*bosru 'qin 'elutloq'<br>"the god is able to use the metal"<br><br>the version with no overt subject noun becomes:<br><br>*bosru 'elutloq'<br>"he, she, it is able to use the metal"<br><br>Let's assume for the sake of argument that it was at this stage that the association was established where "able to use" =&gt; "value". Then it could be that, once the pronominal prefix */'e-/ was lost, the reanalysis of late no' Hol */bosru lutloq'/ from divalent "he, she, it is able to use the metal" (idiomatically, = "the metal is valuable to him, her, it") to univalent "the metal is valuable" becomes straightforward, since by the OSV word-order of archaic modern Klingon (note toasts like {'IwlIj jachjaj}), /bosru/ could be standing here as either subject or object. What's more, verbs used as adjectives also stand after their noun in no' Hol (note /q'op srim/ "nearby matter" from the paq'batlh), so the string */bosru lutloq'/ could have appropriated an adjectival use very quickly after becoming univalent in the first place.<br><br>We have other verbs where something similar may have happened, notably {mev} (which can be used with one or two arguments) and {meQ} (which can also be used with one or two arguments, and also adjectivally). As loghaD points out, though, there are many possibilities!<br><br>taH:<br>&gt; We were discussing a similar example on the Conlangs group on<br>&gt; Facebook, yesterday: The noun "ward" is most commonly used to<br>&gt; mean "somebody/something to be guarded", but an older use of<br>&gt; the word also has it as "somebody/something that guards".<br><br>Something similar turns up in Klingon {boQ} (v.) "assist" =&gt; {boQ} (n.) "aide, assistant", but also "assistance".<br><br><div>QeS<br></div> 		 	   		  </div></body>
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