[Tlhingan-hol] Greetings from Maltz

[Robyn Stewart]

I find when I'm speaking I almost always miss the lu- on lutu'lu', and frequently when writing. It's something I specifically have to watch for, whereas Da- instead of vI- or bI- or something would be just a weird speech error. I think it's because tu'lu' is almost set. The same happens to other languages.

English : There's doughnuts in this bag. (A little marked, but not uncommon).
French: ça n'est pas when grammar would call for ça ne sont pas. (So common that I remember being taught that while technically wrong it was normal, in school in the 1970s).
Russian:  Есть for both singular and plural, kind of a cheat as the Russian verb to be is degenerate anyway and I don't know any other conjugations of it in the present.

I haven't worked with Spanish for too long to remember. Is Hay used for both singular and plural and if so is there a technically more correct way to say it?

No, those aren't unrelated languages, but they all did that independently. I'm fascinated by the fact that Klingon seems to have done it on its own without Mark planning it into the language. Maybe t's just something that languages do.

- Qov

-----Original Message-----
From: Felix Malmenbeck [mailto:felixm at kth.se] 
Sent: November 12, 2013 11:27 PM
To: De'vID
Cc: tlhIngan-Hol
Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Greetings from Maltz


> (Has any reason ever been given why {tu'lu'} is sometimes used when 
> the grammar demands {lutu'lu'}, or is it just one of those things 
> which happen but are never explained?)

KGT pages 168-172 talks about how the omission of lu- is fairly common in colloquial Klingon.

That being said, in the case of tu'lu', the omission does almost seem to be the rule rather than the exception.
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