tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jun 02 16:27:06 1994

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Re: -moH and transitivity


Mark Nudelman writes:
>>>
In fact, in all the canonical
examples of -moH that I can find, it is used with an intransitive
verb.  Is it legal to use -moH on a transitive verb?
If it is, the resulting verb has *two* objects.  For example, HoHmoH
would be to cause SOMEONE to kill SOMEONE ELSE.   "HoD qaHoHmoH"
would seem to mean "I cause you to kill the captain."  But qa-
implies the object is "you", what is that HoD doing there?  And how
could you say  "I cause the officer to kill the captain"?
"HoD yaS vIHoHmoH" must be wrong; there is no evidence for two objects
strung together like this.  Besides, it can be read "I caused him to
kill the captain's officer."
<<<<

We've had this discussion before.  And I pointed out the problems in
my article in HolQeD 1:2.
The one example of -moH with a causative verb that I know of is on TKD, p. 38

HIQoymoH "let me hear (something)"
	literally  "you-me hear cause"

"hear" would seem to be a transitive verb.  It would seem to take direct
object pronouns in Klingon as in English (we hear SOMETHING).  However,
in this construction, where a transitive verb takes -moH, you get a
typical causitive equivalent to 

You [subj] cause me [direct object] to hear (something).

Semantically, this is exactly what you would suspect, especially in an
agglutinating language like Klingon.  But
as I pointed out, we do not know how the normal object of hear (the "something"
that both Okrand and I put in parentheses) would be expressed syntactically.
Okrand has not told us.  The verbal prefix system allows for only two 
argument slots.

I also pointed out the interesting problem of making causitives out of
transitives that are formed with -moH.  So if you have an intransitive/
transitive pair like vemmoH/vem (the best glossed example in TKD)

wake (someone) up (v)		vemmoH
wake up, cease sleeping (v)	vem

then how would you say "You cause me to wake up (someone)"?  The causative
"wake up" is already vemmoH.

It would seem to require the double causative *vemmoHmoH, but
as far as we know, that is not kosher.  And we still have the problem of
how the 3rd argument (the person woken up) would be expressed syntactically.

Human agglutinating languages that work like Klingon (and there are plenty
of them) very often use an an affix like -moH as a transitivizer and
causitivizer.  Mongolian sometimes allows two moH-like suffixes to get
a causative based on an intransitive verb.  As a linguist, I would
postulate that Klingon does the same and that Okrand's description is
simply incomplete in this respect.

Speculation and guessing are worthless.  All you can do legitimately is
formulate intelligent questions and present them to an informant.  Perhaps
Okrand will eventually address this question.

Ken

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