tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 04 11:13:02 2004

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Re: participle equivalents in tlhIngan Hol

...Paul ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 [email protected] wrote:
> the difference between an active participle (a verb ending in -ing) and a
> passive participle (a verb ending in -ed [or the irregular equivalent thereof])
> is just the position of the -bogh phrase relative to the noun it modifies:
>
> qetbogh loD
> running man
>
> Hol chenmoHbogh
> created language

Sorry, but all you've demonstrated here is subject/object differentiation.

/qetbogh loD/ could mean EITHER "the man who is running" or "the man who
was running".  /Hol chenmoHbogh/ could mean either "the language he/she/it
created" or "the language he/she/it is creating".

Klingon verbs do not have a tense, they have only aspect.  Using the
suffixes like /-taH/, /-ta'/, /-pu'/ and /-lI'/, you can indicate aspect,
but without them, aspect and tense can only be indicated by context:

/qettaHbogh loD/ = "The man who is/was/will be running"
/qetlI'bogh loD/ = "The man who has/will have finished running"

/wa'Hu qettaHbogh loD vIlegh/ = "Yesterday I saw a man running" or
                                "Yesterday I saw the man who ran" or
                          "Yesterday I saw the man who will be running"

It just so happened, in your two examples, you used one case where the
noun modified is an object, and one case where the noun modified is the
subject (of the clause).

...Paul

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