tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 28 09:31:08 1995
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Re: bIjatlh 'e' yImev
>Date: Thu, 27 Apr 1995 19:04:26 -0400
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>According to [email protected]:
>> This sentence is more like
>> "Stop [your] speaking." Thus, I contend that one of my previous attempts at
>> making up a Klingon sentence may yet have merit: <moQ luQuj matlh mara je
>> 'e' jeS worgh> was intended to mean "Worf participated in playing ball with
>> Maltz and Mara."
>My problem with this attempt is the word choice {jeS}, which
>means "participate", not "participate in". It strikes me as a
>rather intransitive verb. Your sentence literally translates
>into the two sentences:
>"Maltz and Mara play ball. Worf participates that."
>See? Doesn't that sound rather awkward? Furthermore, "play
>ball" is probably a little too idiomatic to presume that it
>translates well. We do not know that {Quj} exhibits
>transitivity in this specific way.
Um.... actually, I think I agree with WestphalWz here. While it's true
that 'e' is an object pronoun, we mustn't assume that objects in Klingon
exactly correspond to objects in English. "Participate" in English is, in
a very real sense, a transitive verb. It's just that it's object is always
governed by the preposition "in" (you participate in something). We
already have evidence that Klingon is willing to play fast and loose with
interpreting its objects as various other tenses (the verb Da, and also the
usage of ghoS with no locative, or the "ro'qegh 'Iwchab HInob" sentence,
where HI-, a direct object marker, instead points to the -vaD object). The
"object" of "jeS", if I can be permitted to use intuition, is unlikely to
be understood to be anything else than the activity participated in.
This is a major point of Krankor's objection to classifiying Klingon verbs
as transitive and intransitive. He maintains that lots of verbs (all?) can
take objects... it's just not necessarily clear what the object of "Qong"
would be. But it could be something (maybe the thing you lie on when you
sleep, so you can sleep a bed). I don't know that I agree with the extent
to which Krankor takes this, but much of his point is valid.
>> <-taH> is
>> used several times in the <-ghach> construction examples. Furthermore,
>> <machHa'> seems to come across as the "undoing of being little." Even
>> <machbe'ghach>, whether better or worse, seems to come across as "[the] n=
>> ot
>> being small."
>I rather much agree.
Notably, -taH is used in -ghach constructions ONLY by people other than
Okrand, desparate to make nouns of simple verbs. It is not a meaningless
suffix, and was proposed for this use by Glen Proechel, probably modeling
it after an analogous Esperanto process. This doesn't mean it's bad, but
it shouldn't be applied blindly. The *only* cannon use of -ghach is with
the -Ha' suffix: naDHa'ghach.
~mark