[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: Qam

[nIqolay q]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu> wrote:
>> Klingon Word of the Day for Friday, January 31, 2014
>>
>> Klingon word: Qam
>> Part of speech: verb
>> Definition: stand
>
>   QamvIS Hegh qaq law' torvIS yIn qaq puS
>   Better to die on our feet than live on our knees. (ST6 & TKW)
>   ("Dying while standing is preferable to living while kneeling.")
>
> TKW 95:  The grammatical construction is a bit aberrant; one would expect {QamtaHvIS} and {tortaHvIS}. In proverbs, grammatical shortcuts are not uncommon.

What's interesting to me about this comment in TKW is that it doesn't
mention the other strange parts of this sentence's grammar. If Hegh
and yIn are intended to be verbs, as suggested by the use of verbs in
the more literal translation ("dying while standing, living while
kneeling"), then we seem to have a law'-puS construction that uses
verbs in the place of nouns. If Hegh and yIn are nouns, then we have
-taHvIS phrases modifying nouns ("death while standing, life while
kneeling"), which as far as I know isn't seen elsewhere. TKW doesn't
talk much about the grammar of Klingon, so perhaps the dropping of a
suffix was simply the least-complicated example to use in explaining
that the sentence was constructed strangely.