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

[De'vID]

On 26 April 2016 at 20:19, Felix Malmenbeck <felixm at kth.se> wrote:
> I also think that it would make sense for certain professions to have sets of commonly used affixes which do not really contribute to the Klingon language at large except indirectly. Consider for example the suffix -ose, which is used in chemistry to a sugar. If you asked me for a list of English suffixes, I probably wouldn't think to include it, because most speakers would never actually use it as a suffix; we only ever use it as part of words that originated in chemistry and then became more popular, such as sucrose or dextrose. As such, it's almost more a point of etymology than one of morphology.
> -ya' could be seen as similar to -ose in that sense, as it is not applied to words to change their meaning, but makes its way into the language for historical reasons.

What if I told you that there's an undocumented (in TKD, KGT, etc.)
noun suffix that's been hidden in canon all along? It's {-ngan}, and
it turns a place name into an inhabitant of that place. It used to be
a separate word {ngan} but became a suffix over time as it almost
always follows a place name. It also has a special rule where if it is
attached to a noun ending in {n} or {ng} that final letter is dropped.

Observe the suffix in action:
{tera'} -> {tera'ngan}
{vulqan} -> {vulqangan}
{tlhIng [yoS]} -> {tlhIngan}

(Of course I made up the above, but if Marc Okrand told us it was true
tomorrow it would change nothing about the language.)

-- 
De'vID