[Tlhingan-hol] How would you feel about new Klingon morphemes? [was: New expression: Klingon for "dim sum" revealed‏]

[Rhona Fenwick]

ghItlhpu' loghaD, jatlh:
> How would you all feel about learning more suffixes than the ones we currently know?

Several things come to mind, somewhat contradictorily.

For any new *grammatical* suffixes I'm neither for nor against them in principle, but as Qov said, if they were revealed I'd also appreciate some explicit handwaving as to why we didn't know about them before. The verb suffixes that we know form a largish but by no means vast set. pojwI' counts the number of distinct verb suffixes in Klingon at 36; much larger than English, in which weak verbs have at most 3 distinct suffixes - /-s/, /-ed/, /-ing/ (if one doesn't split the participle and the gerund) - but compare another agglutinative language like Inuktitut, which has several hundreds of inflectional and derivational suffixes. And the amount of canon text we have by now is not really that small any more. It'd be good if any new suffixes were accompanied by reasoning for why they haven't been encountered previously - though it's certainly true that the answer could just as well be "You didn't ask"! On the other hand, a new suffix might be a perfect opportunity to incorporate the irrealis, which is the only major aspect of grammatical expression I can think of that Klingon truly seems to struggle with.

On the other hand, new lexical suffixes, and the domains in which they can be used, would be interesting, though even so I'd think that they would be found only in semantically limited sets. Ending for element names, say - though even there English has several (-ium in general, but -ine, -on, -gen for limited subsets). But the fact that such things are so semantically bounded would mean that even there, I would be uncomfortable deriving my own terms using such suffixes.

One thing I am very intrigued by, though, is the area of dialectic variation, as others have mentioned. We already know that some dialects of Klingon use a slightly different lexicon to that of ta' Hol. Is this true for grammar, too? Is there a dialect somewhere that's innovated {neH}, already slightly unusual grammatically in not using {'e'} as a complementiser, into a full-blown desiderative suffix? Are there dialects that have incorporated other verbs into the verb complex, as ta' Hol seems historically to have done with {choH}, {qa'}, {bej}, {taH}, {ta'}? And not only with suffixes, for that matter - are there dialects that preserve reflexes of the no' Hol verbal pronominal prefixes {me-} (3rd plural subject, 3rd plural object), {'u-} (3rd plural subject, no object), and {'e-} (3rd singular subject, 3rd singular object)? All these are merely hypothetical, of course. But I'm intrigued by the possibilities.

QeS 'utlh
 		 	   		  
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