[Tlhingan-hol] {-be'} and {-qu'} with type 7 and 9 verb suffixes

[Robyn Stewart]

I don’t remember ever seeing this idea before.  Your suggestions of what they might mean are not implausible. It seems very odd to reverse the semantic meaning of a type-9, and we’ve never seen it in canon, but that doesn’t mean it could never happen. I’m constructing words and trying to feel what they might mean to me, and how else I might express that meaning.

?Heghpa’be’ qama’ mejlaH ‘avwI’. = yIntaHvIS qama’ ratlhnIS ‘avwI’.
?choQaHchughbe’ jIHegh. = choQaHbe’chugh jIHegh ‘ej choQaHchugh jIHegh.
?DaneH’a’be’? = DaneHbe’’a’? – already a question we don’t know how to answer with HIja’ or ghobe’, but if {DaneH’a’be’} is valid I’ll bet the answer is the opposite of {DaneHbe’’a’}.
?malaDtaHvISbe’ = ... I can’t make it mean something different from malaDbe’taHvIS.

Of yours, I think -chughqu’ for if and only if is the biggest stretch.  I’d get only _IF_  ... which now that I put it that way is momspeak (assuming your mom isn’t a mathematician) for iff.

I imagine that if the idea were put to Maltz—who is known to be in Germany this week—that he’d wrinkle his nose and say that such things sounded like something a professor or a rental car contract might say, not normal conversational tools.  That would explain why we’ve never seen such things in canon. ;-)

Such constructions won’t mean anything to other Klingon speakers, but it’s one of the most interesting, “What if Klingon worked this way?” posts I’ve seen in a long time.  You could write it up in more detail for submission to the reboot of HolQeD that we seem to be organizing in another thread. 

 

- Qov





 

From: Michael Kúnin [mailto:netzakh at yahoo.com] 
Sent: October 27, 2015 16:39
To: tlhingan-hol at kli.org
Subject: [Tlhingan-hol] {-be'} and {-qu'} with type 7 and 9 verb suffixes

 

While the usage of these rovers with main verbs and with type 2 suffixes or {-laH} is well attested, it occurred to me that nothing explicitly prevents {-be'} and {-qu'} from being added to ANY verb suffix. If this is possible, this would create quite interesting constructions.

 

For example:

 

{-chughbe'} "not if" = "regardless of" ?

{-chughqu'} "intensively if" = "if and only if" ?

{-pa'be'} "not before" = "after" ?

 

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