tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 14 14:26:11 1995

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tlhIngan no' Hol pab

I was doing some pontificating today. I've never really presented many of my
speculations on historical Klingon grammar to the list, mainly because of the
defensive stance others find necessary. With that in consideration, keep in
mind that all these speculations are simply that --- *speculations*.

My thoughts earlier today turned mainly on -lu' and some questions
surrounding it. But what I may not have expressed is my theory that Klingon
was once verb final, and retains much evidence of this ancestry in many of
its features. Some examples include the following: 1) postpositions, which
Klingon uses, are primarily characteristic of verb-final langs; 2) adverbials
precede the verb (this is the commoner case in verb-final langs, whereas
non-verb-final langs are likely to have adverbials follow the verb [I might
be wrong about this; if so, someone straighten me out; but I seem to recall
the stats this way]); 3) the noun-noun syntax (= possessor-possessed) (?)
(I'm not sure on this one; I do know that such possessive syntax is reversed
in verb-initial langs, like Hebrew and Arabic).

In my exploration into this theoretical OSV Klingon, all examples will follow
this syntax. I have not attempted to mark any usages as such, but all should
be inferred as OSV. I have used no modern Klingon whatsoever in this post,
unless otherwise marked.

One hypothesis for the etymology of the prefixes that stems from this
speculation is that obj-subj pronouns would have all come before the verb,
and perhaps have developed into modern prefixes (jIH Qong > jIQong; maH Sup >
maSup; SoH jIH bach > qabach). This last one does require some further
explanation, but it may have just been a long evolution that convered its
tracks well, or else just a weakness in the theory.

Btw, so as not to cause any groanings among the professionals around here,
I'm suffering from a case of understanding the concepts but being ignorant of
the standard lingo. Forgive my humbly non-technical descriptions and
non-standard terms that I must invent out of thin air. And forgive my young
naivity, while you're at it. It's gotten me into so much damn trouble in
these parts.

Nick already brought up the grammaticalization (OOH! Big word!) of verbs into
suffixes, and showed the process that rIntaH is now going thru. I think he
did it (with modern Klingon examples) like this.

1) SoH DuQaw' [ghaH]. rIntaH.
2) SoH DuQaw' [ghaH] rIntaH.
3) SoH DuQaw' rIntaH [ghaH].
4) *SoH DuQaw'rItlh ghaH.

#4 is the speculated aspect marker of Klingon spoken several centuries from
now. I remember pointing out how the same process is acting on qar'a' in tag
questions. In modern Klingon both are appropriate: {Dejpu' Hov qar'a'} and
{Dejpu' qar'a' Hov}. I may have failed to explain how such words manage to
work their way to the other side of the subject, except in saying that the
subject can often be implicit, and so {Dejpu' qar'a' Hov} may be a
hypercorrection. However, now I could state that it may also be on account
that Klingon was once verb-final, but that is admittedly weak.

Turning now to -lu', I postulated today that if Klingon was indeed formerly
verb-final, then we would have constructions such as this:

jIH yaS muQaH.
"The officer helps me."

Now, I learned in a discussion with d'Armond Speers (hint, hint: feel free to
jump in here, d'Armond or any other professionals) that the purpose of
English passive is to topicalize the patient, and does so simply by raising
the object to the subject position (first) in a sentence. This applies in
English to direct and indirect objects ("I was given a ball") or really any
noun in the predicate, usually excepting prepositional objects. Now, in
(verb-final) Klingon, the patient is already first, but it may be desirable
by the speaker to raise the agent (subject) to the first position, and could
do so by some sort of passive. (It's worth noting at this point that when I'm
talking about topicalization and so forth, I disregard the question over the
meaning of -'e' as topic or focus marker). The real speculation comes into
play when I thought up the crazy notion that perhaps -lu' was at one time (in
this verb-final stage of Klingon syntax) a passive marker, whose purpose was
to topicalize the agent by raising it to the front. In that case, it would
behave thus:

yaSmo' jIH jIQaHlu'.
"I am helped by the officer."

However, this was probably more likely

yaS jIH vIQaHlu'.

Because I'm assuming the pronoun/prefix structure was already in place at
this time, it would be appropriate to assume that a speaker could put {yaS}
as the first element of the sentence by making the pronoun implicit.

yaS muQaH.

So, the passive was more useful in these kinds of cases:

puq yaS qIp  --->  yaS puq qIplu'
puq yaSpu' luqIp  --->  yaSpu' puq qIplu'
puqpu' yaS qIp  --->  yaS puqpu' luqIplu'

But somewhere along the lines Klingon subjects began to come at the very end.
Indeed, in modern Klingon the subject is the only element that follows a verb
in a sentence. At this point, it is no longer necessary to raise nouns from
an inner field or predicate in the sentence. Some langs do topicalize the
last noun, e.g., Malagasy and, I think, Russian.

Formerly, the possible obliquing of the agent in a passive sentence was only
a by-product of the passive, but since -lu' need no longer topicalize the
agent (because of its final position in the sentence), its main function
could be the obliquing of the subject/agent.

With that in mind, it has always been possible to omit an object/patient (cf.
jIQaH) but a subject/agent has been obligatory. -lu' does away with that, and
thus we have constructions like {ba'lu'} with obliqued agent and the patient
is omitted because syntactically it is not obligatory.

That's why -lu' is technically defined as an impersonal (according to Nick's
vast resource of knowledge, not mine) even tho we have the phenomenon with
prefixes as in {vIQaHlu'}, which is only remnant evidence of the days when
-lu' was a passive marker.

For those of you who are interested and in-the-know, this very same process
is evident in German, where the auxiliary {werden} with the past participle
functions as a passive marker, yet impersonal forms such as {Es wird hier
gespielt}/{Hier wird gespielt} (= naDev reHlu') are very common. The
impersonal use of the nominative {es} may even be some analogy to Klingon's
3s-obj-in-the-prefix phenomenon as in {vIQaHlu'} (= "*Es* wird ihm
geholfen"/"Ihm wird geholfen"). German does not need a passive to raise a
noun to the front of the sentence, rather it can do so because it is
relatively free-order as far as its nouns are concerned. Passive may serve to
remedy the possible ambiguity of OVS in German, because nominative is
distinguished from accusative only in masculine nouns.

This is all for part of a HolQeD article I may write, tho the non-standard
terminology makes it an abomination, and I haven't fully developed some lines
of thought in certain areas. But I bring this up to see what sparks of
discussion it can stir.

Guido

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