[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: meq

[lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh]

I’m agreeing with SuStel on this one. Maybe someone could provide an example that would make a possibility that I haven’t considered, but one should consider:

1. Comparatives in Klingon are unrelated to any other grammatical construction in the language. They are exceptional.

2. Comparatives have a fairly rigid structure that limits their grammatical versatility.

3. As an expansion of #1, comparatives are structured so differently from any other kind of sentence in Klingon that blending it with some other sentence structure to make the comparative a dependent clause would be strikingly different from anything we’ve seen in canon or had explained to us in any context.

It’s already the case that stumbling into a comparative sentence can make the meaning of a sentence very strange to parse until you are in deep enough to recognize, “Oh, right. This is a comparative sentence. The grammar and word order is completely different. I get it. Now, I can put the words I’ve already read into context and read the rest of the sentence.” If you add complexity to this, you make something very challenging to understand.

Any time you consider doing something like this, I’d recommend you look through the grammatical toolbox that Klingon gives you and try expressing what you want to say using something OTHER than a comparative. Or do it in multiple sentences.

jIH tin law SoH tIn puS. ngoDvammo’, qara’laHtaH.

That’s SO much easier to parse than something like the following, which might not really be a Klingon sentence:

*jIH tInmo’ law’ SoH tInmo’ puS, qara’laHtaH.*

We can always come up with weird and complex constructions in Klingon, but that doesn’t make them grammatically legal. It just makes us sound like the kind of pretentious human students of Klingon that any native speaker would gleefully punch in the mouth every time we say something like this.

lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
Door Repair Guy, Retired Honorably



> On Feb 19, 2016, at 9:52 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 2/19/2016 8:53 PM, John R. Harness wrote:
>> Q for everyone: Can you put -mo' in the midst of the law' / puS
>> construction?
> 
> I don't see how. In what role? Noun or verb suffix?
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name
> 
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