tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 11 17:05:47 2010

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

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

Re: suffixes -lu'wI'

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

On 2/11/2010 2:41 PM, Terrence Donnelly wrote:
> I've kind of always tended to think that Andre's idea wasn't totally
> impossible. How about another type of nominalization, with {-ghach},
> eg. {leghlu'ghach} 'the act of being seen' (there's no exact English
> equivalent, but so what?).

When I see {leghlu'ghach}, I think "the act of one's seeing." A noun 
meaning the act of someone unspecified seeing. I don't know if the word 
would be meaningful to Klingons, though.

Again, the issue here isn't the Klingon, it's the tendency to think in 
English passive voice when you're looking at the word. If you must 
translate to think about the meaning, translate into the active voice 
and try to work with that. If there's a difference when you do that, 
you're working from translation, not from the original.

 > If {-ghach} means the performance of an action by an implied subject,

I don't think that's what it means. {-ghach} is all about the difference 
between the verb as a noun and the verb plus suffix as a noun. We know 
for a fact that {tlhutlh} is not a noun. But imagine for a moment that 
it were, and it meant "drinking, the act of drinking." Now add a suffix, 
say {-qa'}: {tlhutlhqa'}. We also know for a fact that {tlhutlhqa'} 
cannot be a noun, but if it were it would be the meaning of {tlhutlh} 
plus the meaning of {-qa'}: "resumed drinking, the resumption of 
drinking. Well, Klingon DOES allow us to do this, if we add {-ghach} to 
the end: {tlhutlhqa'ghach} "resumed drinking."

The suffix in there is not incidental to the meaning; it is just as 
important as the verb itself. It is exactly what distinguishes the full, 
nominalized verb from the bare stem if it could be nominalized.

Where in all of this does the subject of the verb come in? It doesn't. 
You call it an implied subject, but I contend that there is no implied 
subject. Yes, logic tells us that SOMEONE must do the verb, at least in 
theory, in order for the verb to mean anything, but the actual 
performance of the verb, even just in theory, IS NOT BUILT INTO THE 
NOMINALIZED VERB. {-ghach} does not capture it.


> Okrand says that the true meaning of {-lu'} is that someone
> unspecified applies the action to the object, and that it only
> superficially resembles an English passive.  I don't know why he uses
> verb prefixes as if the object were the subject, but neither {-wI'}
> or {-ghach} take verb prefixes, so the problem is moot.

We don't actually know that for sure, either, though my money is once 
again against it.


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

Back to archive top level