tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 20 12:22:40 1998
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Re: RE: Coffee is ready
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: RE: Coffee is ready
- Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 15:22:31 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
- Priority: NORMAL
bIghoHchu'ta'. bIpojchu'ta' je. I was just so anxious to make
one of those incredibly rare useages of the suffix {-beH} that I
lept at it and refused to let go when I realized that in this
case, it had to go on the object instead of the subject of this
particular verb. It was an example of screwing up because of the
option to translate into the English passive voice:
"It is ready to be drunk."
Meanwhile, digging back into the real grammar, you are quite
right. This is not enough like {baHbeH peng}. Hmmm. But that's
not a good example either for the same reason. The torpedo
doesn't fire. One fires a torpedo. Okay, when in doubt, go to
TKD...
labbeH.
It all comes back to me now. This is one of those things Okrand
came up with to match Valkris's English lip movements when they
redubbed her lines into Klingon. That's why we don't use it very
often. It didn't really have another reason to exist.
But I can rescue this yet! Given the way that Klingons consider
taste to be a potential action and not a trait or state:
'eybeH qavIn!
charghwI'
On Mon, 20 Jul 1998 11:46:14 -0700 (PDT) Robyn Stewart
<[email protected]> wrote:
> ---"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