[Tlhingan-hol] Pronouncing Klingon correctly

[André Müller]

Something that I've never seen before in any natural language is the exact
workings of {-lu'}, the passive/indefinite subject suffix. It implies an
unspecified subject, but then the object that is being acted upon triggers
subject agreement (i.e. 'someone sees me' becomes {vIlughlu'}), but then,
syntactically, the object stays where it should: before the verb.
I've never seen this before in any natural language (and I'm a linguist
too, so I've heard of quite a bunch of crazy stuff going on in the world's
languages!).

- André

2015-11-30 17:42 GMT+01:00 Rohan Fenwick <qeslagh at hotmail.com>:

> ghItlhpu' qunnoQ, jatlh:
> > I have read too,that Okrand deliberately integrated in klingon
> > elements unlike anything else included in terran languages ; Is there
> > a link,where these "exclusively alien elements" of klingon are
> > mentioned ?
>
> I don't know that a list of such things has ever been collected in one
> place.
>
> In any case, only one such "exclusively alien" fact springs to my mind
> readily (though I'm sure there are many others), and that is that there is
> no Terran language that has a phonemic distinction between the Klingon
> sounds represented as {q} and {Q}. Both are found phonetically in various
> languages - the former reasonably frequently, the latter much less so and
> mostly in the Caucasus (and no surprise there) - but there's no known
> natural language where the distinction between the two is phonologically
> meaningful.
>
> QeS 'utlh
>
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