tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 11 16:50:24 2010

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Re: suffixes -lu'wI'

David Trimboli ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

On 2/11/2010 1:07 PM, André Müller wrote:
> Okay, "correctness" clearly depends on the analysis here. Okrand's analysis
> differs from mine, but is valid too. I understand that Okrand's analyses are
> always preferred over what linguists might say (in a natural language this
> phenomenon wouldn't be all that easy to solve with just citing a sentence
> from the grammar).
> Unfortunately Okrand doesn't show us why he believes (I know, he created the
> language) that the subject prefix marks the object here, instead of the
> subject standing in the object position.

He says flat out that verb prefixes indicating first- and second-person 
subjects are used to indicate first-and second-person OBJECTS when used 
on verbs with {-lu'}, and that {lu-} is used to indicate a plural, 
third-person OBJECT. This is a very clear explanation; I don't see how 
you can get that the subject is now in the object position, unless you 
inject your own ideas.

In English, the passive voice changes the syntactic role of 
participating nouns while leaving their semantic roles unchanged.

    The child hit the officer.

    "The child":   syntactic role: subject
                   semantic role: agent
    "the officer": syntactic role: (direct) object
                   semantic role: patient

    The officer was hit by the child.

    "the child":   syntactic role: object of preposition
                   semantic role: agent
    "The officer": syntactic role: subject
                   semantic role: patient

Semantically the two sentences are identical, but syntactically they are 
very different.

Klingon simply has no feature that does this. Using {-lu'} does not 
accomplish this.

    yaS qIp puq.

    puq: syntactic role: subject
         semantic role: agent
    yaS: syntactic role: object
         semantic role: patient

    yaS qIplu'.

    puq: N/A
    yaS: syntactic role: object
         semantic role: patient

In Klingon, {yaS} "officer" never changes its syntactic or semantic 
relationships to the verb. It is always object and patient. It never 
takes on any other role.

Flipped-around verb prefixes on verbs with {-lu'} don't change this:

    [jIH] muqIp puq.
    "The officer hit me."

    [jIH]: syntactic role: object
           semantic role: patient
    puq:   syntactic role: subject
           semantic role: agent

    [jIH] vIqIplu'.
    "I am hit."

    [jIH]: syntactic role: object
           semantic role: patient
    puq:   N/A

The strange verb prefixes make absolutely no difference to the sentence. 
Why do the prefixes change for {-lu'} verbs? Just because.

The other side of this question is how {-wI'} works. We are never given 
a detailed description of the workings of this suffix; we are just told 
what you end up with. By looking at the huge number of examples we see 
that it always turns the verb into a noun that represents the subject, 
by virtue of the fact that the subject does the verb. {Suv tlhIngan. 
SuvwI' ghaH tlhIngan'e'.}

So on the one hand you've got a verb with no subject, and on the other 
hand you have a suffix which turns verbs into nouns representing their 
subjects. Mutually incompatible.

Note that I'm not saying it CAN'T be the case that *{leghlu'wI'} means 
what you want it to mean. Perhaps there is an arbitrary rule of Klingon 
that hasn't been discovered yet that says exactly that. But you cannot 
derive this formula from the rules and examples we have to date. The 
only reason you come up with it is because it works for its passive 
English translation. If you keep the English translation of {leghlu'} 
active, "someone sees," then you can't play the same English trick 
(?"someone which sees" does not equal "that which is seen").

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/

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