tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 03 21:30:56 1998

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Re: Nature phenomenon

SuStel speculates:
>Suppose for a moment that you are Marc Okrand writing The Klingon
>Dictionary.  You look out the window and realize you need to invent a few
>words describing the weather.  You decide concepts of "raining" or "snowing"
>will be represented by verbs, like many other things in Klingon.
>
>How do you put this down in the dictionary?  It is unlikely that you have
>thought about this and decided that these verbs always have unspecified
>subjects; you simply think of the words.  {SIS} "rain," {peD} "snow."  You
>jot them down in your word list like that.  You never consider usage (at
>least, not right away).

In many languages, the usage is exactly "it rains" and "it snows".  One
verb comprises the entire sentence.  There's no reason Klingon can't do
it that way, but the existence of {-lu'} just fits the concept so well.

>Now we're stuck with the predicament of words which just don't seem to WANT
>to be verbs.  Verbs require a subject, even if it is unspecified.  Again,
>just how would YOU write a verbal, non-idiomatic translation of "It is
>raining"?

In Spanish:  "llueve".  It seems to want to be a verb *there*. :-)

>I don't like the idea of {SISlu'} or {peDlu'}.  It looks to me entirely like
>an English speaker's attempt to get around the problems of translation.

The subject is unimportant; the action is what is being considered.
English can't easily express this with verbs whose usual subject is not
a thinking being, so I doubt that it's an artifact of translating from
English.

>I don't like the idea of {SIS} and {peD} NOT having subject at all.  It
>doesn't fit in with anything we've ever learned about the language.
>Unfortunately, we have no information about what that subject is.

That's what it boils down to.  Are {SIS} and {peD} transitive, having
the cloud or sky or whatever as the subject and the rain or snow etc.
as the object?  Are {SIS} and {peD} intransitive, with the rain, snow,
whatever as the subject?  It's a common question for some of the more
ambiguously-worded definitions in TKD; we just have to wait for usage
to become obvious from examples like {pIpyuS yIghor}.

[blatantly extreme and unsupportable speculation completely ignored :-)]

-- ghunchu'wI'

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