tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 29 11:56:51 1998

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Re: Nature phenomenon

>> I'm slightly surprised that you reject out of hand the likelihood that
>> {SISlu'} is correct.  If you "feel" that {SIS} has no subject, I would
>> expect that you'd use known Klingon grammar to indicate that lack.  By
>> itself, {SIS} implies that there *is* a subject.
>> 
>I'm not responding specifically to ghunchu'wI', but more generally...
>I always felt that even {-lu'} means there _is_ a subject, it's just
>not known or general (and in fact, looking up TKD 4.2.5 lists these two
>along with "indefinite" which I read as "undefined"(?) but still there)
>and I really don't see why "one rains"* should be preferable to "it rains".
>It looks to me more like a matter of style.

Back in the early days before we knew what rain is, we could have said
SISlu'.  But then scientist studied the phenomenon and found out what rain
is and what causes it.  The subject is no longer -lu' because now we know
that there is a specific subject involved.  That subject can be refered to
with the pronoun [it] which can be dropped; leaving SIS.  Sure, what is the
[it] refering to?  It could refer to cats and dogs, or buckets, but we all
know what is really falling from the sky; do we need to spell it out every time?
  What is rain?  It's the water vapor that has settled onto dust, etc, which
is floating around in the air, blah blah blah, 'til the drops of water fall.
  This action of the water droplets falling is refered to by the verb SIS.
We could specify what the subject is, but I think everyone over five years
old knows what it is.

DloraH

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