[Tlhingan-hol] Piraha

[Anthony Appleyard]

This long sentence becomes more legible with commas between the clauses:-
maHeghnISbe'meH, matlhuHlaHmeH, muD lamHa'choHmeH, jan Dachu'rupmeH, qaghuHmoHmeH, qarI'.
With a long chain-sentence with the clauses joined by "and" or "and then", an editor can easily replace "and" by ". And"; I have seen this done in modern printings of Anglo-Saxon language long chain-sentences wiith many "-and then-" links; the original, like Klingon, did not use capital letters.
----Original message----
>From : esperantist at gmail.com
Date : 01/11/2015 - 23:58 (GMTST)
To : tlhingan-hol at kli.org
Subject : Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Piraha
I think what is meant with "main verb" is actually "finite verb", which in the case of Klingon means, a verb in a main clause that governs the subject (and potential object). In the sentence you gave, {maSachnIS} is the finite verb, and {mataHmeH} is a kind of subclause. You could call it converb or dependent verb, too.
...
But what we can do in Klingon is come up with a potentially endless string of dependent clauses, non-finite verbs with Type 9 suffixes, e.g.:
[...] maHeghnISbe'meH matlhuHlaHmeH muD lamHa'choHmeH jan Dachu'rupmeH qaghuHmoHmeH qarI'.
= I hailed you in order to warn you so that you are prepared to activate the device so that it may clean the atmosphere so we can breathe so that we don't have to die [...]
vaj... veHmey HutlhlaH tlhIngan Hol mu'tlheghmey 'e' tobba' ghantoH mu'tlheghvam'e'. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20151102/1e00b17d/attachment.html>