tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 20 11:08:06 1998

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: RE: Coffee is ready

---"William H. Martin"  wrote:
>
> This is merely a suggestion for another way to say, "It is 
> ready," referring to coffee:
> 
> tlhutlhbeHlu'.
> 
> If this prompts discussion, fine.

Obligatory wanderings, that charghwI' well knows:

The suffix /-beH/ "ready to [for an object]" would normally refer to
the subject of the verb.  Thus this sentence might be interpreble as
saying that some indefinite inanimate subject is ready to drink the
coffee.  

It would be nice, and I think it is not unlikely, that we can
interpret the sentence to mean that the coffee, itself an inanimate
object, is ready to
be drunk, be some unspecified object or person.

If you think of /tlhutlhbeH/ meaning "be ready to drink" and the
/-lu'/ added giving it an indefinite subject, then ?/qa'vIn
tlhutlhbeHlu'/ means there is a general preparedness of inanimate
drinkers to consume the coffee.  If you see it as /tlhutlhlu'/ "one
drinks it" and then allow /-beH/ to refer to the object instead of the
subject, then it means that it is ready for one to drink it, exactly
the intended meaning. Often there are  multiple possible meanings of
suffixes and the meaning simply settles on the most likely one, as in
/Say'nISmoH/ which almost always means "need to make clean" and not
"cause to need to be clean."  

I believe there is a TKD example close to /HeghqangmoHlu'bej/
translated "[something] certainly made him willing to die."  This has
the type-2-ness attributed to the object, but then it has /-moH/ which
reverses things anyway, so it's a hard call.  Can a suffix apply to
the object when /-moH/ isn't around to reverse it?  I wasn't certain
enough to recommend this tactic to a beginner.

==
Qov - Beginners' Grammarian 

_________________________________________________________
DO YOU YAHOO!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

Back to archive top level