tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jun 04 12:22:39 1995
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Re: Ditransitives
On Sat, 3 Jun 1995 21:40:42 -0400, "R.B Franklin" <[email protected]> said:
> [I]f I had the ability to add any one, single thing to the Klingon
> grammar, I would add still the following Type 5 suffix:
> 1. -xxx instrumental "with, by means of". Used to denote the
> instrument of an action:
> tajwIjxxx qama' vIHoHta'. (I killed the prisoner with my knife.) [...]
> I have always felt that our attempts to get around this by
> using two verbs, accompanied by {-meH}, {-taHvIS} or {-bogh} are
> clumsy and inadequate and the omission of such a suffix is an oversight.
I think that the constructions with {-meH} or {-taHvIS} look clumsy
because we tend to read too much into the meaning of those suffixes.
Or maybe it is because we need to interpret them literally? It is
true that {tajwIj vIlo'taHvIS qama' vIHoHta'} allows for the option
that I killed the prisoner by kicking him in the throat whilst using
my knife to peel an apple for my son, but that kind of misunderstanding
would be very uncommon, so the convention could be that the knife was
used for the killing unless there is a reason to believe otherwise.
Some languages, such as Chinese, regularly use a verb meaning `use'
or `take' in such cases, and end up saying things like (literally)
`I take/use knife kill prisoner'. If that works better than it does
in Klingon, it is because Chinese doesn't need to explain the temporal
or causal relation between the taking/using and the killing. If I had
the ability to add one thing to Klingon, it would be a Type 9 suffix
with the meaning `by being/doing ...'. Then one could say `By using
my knife, I killed the prisoner', and one could think of {vI-lo'xYz}
as an instrumental postposition.
Such a suffix might be useful for other things too. How do we say
`The ale is as green as grass'? {SuDmo' HIq tI rur 'oH} somehow
doesn't sound right. I wouldn't mind being able to say `By being
green, the ale resembles grass' or, even better, `The ale is green
grass-resemblingly', {tI rurxYz SuD HIq}.
Okay, enough dreaming. Back to the real world.
> Please explain to this layman what causatives are.
A causative is a verb which contains the suffix {-moH} (or an
equivalent element in those Terran languages which have them;
English is not one of those).
The subject of a causative verb is invariably the agent of the causation.
If the original verb is intransitive, its subject becomes the object
of the causative, thus {V X} --> {X V-moH C}.
If the original verb is transitive, there are several things that
Terran languages do. Normally either the subject or the object
becomes the object of the causative; the other becomes an oblique
argument, and receives appropriate marking, according to its semantics:
_The targ ate the qagh._
--> _I fed the targ (with the qagh)._ (S --> O)
or _I fed the qagh to the targ._ (O --> O)
(English doesn't derive `feed' from `eat', but many languages do.
Note that _with the qagh_ can be left out, but _to the targ_ can't.)
So what about {qagh vISopmoH}? Did I give the qagh something to eat
(and how can I say what it was?) or did I make someone/something eat
the qagh (and, again, how can I say who/what that was)? Is there
such a thing as {Y V X} --> {X-Daq Y V-moH C}, for example?
--'Iwvan