[Tlhingan-hol] {ra'} as verb of saying

[qov at kli.org]

Perhaps ja'/jatlh being the only correct verbs of saying is a kind of Klingon prescriptivism.  They were the only ones used in some ancient document considered to be written in the finest Klingon, and some overenthusiastic purist started making up rules to go with it. Thus Maltz told Okrand that only ja' and jatlh could be used, because he'd been corrected for doing so. 

(Teachers at my elementary school teachers corrected me for starting sentences with conjunctions. I remember blinking slowly at the first such teacher and producing well-formed counterexample sentences from library books, and that was the last of it. A high school teacher once tried to tell me that  however shouldn't be the first word in an English sentence, but the best he could come up with in response to my bewildered "why?" was stylistic tradition.  I think of him whenever I start a sentence with however, just as I think of charghwI' whenever I place a -mo' clause after the main clause of a sentence).

- Qov

> -----Original Message-----
> From: SuStel [mailto:sustel at trimboli.name]
> Sent: February 6, 2016 6:51
> To: tlhingan-hol at kli.org
> Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] {ra'} as verb of saying
> 
> On 2/6/2016 4:30 AM, Lieven wrote:
> > Am 05.02.2016 um 16:38 schrieb SuStel:
> >> Here we see {ra'} being used as a verb of saying, as well as having
> >> the persons spoken to as its object.
> >
> > That's nice, some quototation marks can make this look understandable:
> >
> > {SuvwI’pu’Daj ra’ qeylIS: "SaqSub yIjaH".}
> >
> > As I wrote in my previous message, that's nothing new.
> 
> I believe it is. We were told in a HolQeD interview that {ja'} and {jatlh} were
> the only known verbs of saying, even though {tlhob} had already been used
> as one in Power Klingon. Now paq'batlh has used {ra'} as one.
> 
> --
> SuStel
> http://www.trimboli.name/
> 
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