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

[mayqel qunenoS]

the subject new vocabulary vs new suffixes, has a lot to do with the
level of the speaker.

a beginner falls in the trap of requesting new vocabulary. why ?
because he's not yet accustomed to expressing his thoughts with the
existing one. so he reasons "if I had this word and that word", I
would be more at liberty to say this and that.

on the other hand, if you have started writing and expressing yourself
in klingon, you realize that there is already too much vocabulary. and
exactly because you have begun using the language you frequently find
yourself to situations, where your problem isn't the vocabulary (or
lack thereof), but the lack of grammar.

I would love to have a suffix to express the irrealis construction or
I would love to have a suffix to express the concept "at death" since
I can't use the {-Daq} for this purpose. Sure, I can find ways to deal
with the absence of such suffixes, but here lies the absurdity :

on one hand we celebrate klingon's directness and spartan structure
(e.g. we don't repeat plural suffixes where they aren't needed), on
the other hand we are ready to say "ok, it doesn't matter if a suffix,
which could save us the trouble of a long sentence is absent ; we will
just write a railroad for a sentence instead, just to compensate for
that suffix's absence. and we will like it."

to ask for new vocabulary is futile. each of us could ask for a
billion new words which would suit us. a musician would want his own
terminology, a chemist his own, a doctor his own and go figure.

but to ask for a new suffix, is way more meaningful. a new word
addresses the need of a single person ; perhaps the need of none. A
new suffix however, could address the needs of many.

and as ambassador spock would say : the needs of the many outweigh the
needs of the few.

mIv Hurgh qunnoq
peace is a lie there is only passion

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 10:16 AM, Rhona Fenwick <qeslagh at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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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