[Tlhingan-hol] Noun cases

[lojmIt tI'wI'nuv]

You fell into one of those little traps that Okrand left for us. *puqmey* does not mean "children scattered all about". The only example Okrand gave us was {tlhonmey} for "nostrils scattered all about". So, body parts with the "can't use language" plural form imply "scattered all about". That's the only violation of noun gender that has a poetic meaning in Klingon. Any other violation is simply ungrammatical without meaning.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



On Nov 30, 2011, at 10:01 AM, Philip Newton wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 15:13, David Trimboli <david at trimboli.name> wrote:
>> On 11/30/2011 8:20 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
>>> 
>>> Klingon doesn't have declensions; it's agglutinative.
>> 
>> Agglutination and declension are mutually exclusive? Isn't the inflection of
>> a noun by agglutinative suffixes a declension?
> 
> Also, if we take "declension" to be "declension class" (as in "the
> Latin fourth declension"), Klingon arguably has that, too... three
> noun classes, each with its own separate form of the plural marker
> -mey -Du' -pu'. And with each noun belonging to a specific class,
> yielding things such as {jIb Ho'Du'} even though the teeth of a comb
> are not (usually...) a body part.
> 
> But then there is {tIqpu'}, and the "scattered all about" of {puqmey}
> and the like, which makes such a Latinate analysis messy.
> 
> Cheers,
> Philip
> -- 
> Philip Newton <philip.newton at gmail.com>
> 
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