tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 11 17:50:20 2010

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

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

Re: suffixes -lu'wI'

Andrà MÃller ([email protected]) 

Sorry, David, you might've missunderstood me.
2010/2/12 David Trimboli <[email protected]>

> 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.
>

He claims it, because it's the way he likes to analyze it or the way he
wanted Klingon to work. This is not necessarily the way one would analyze
it. There's room for interpretation. Just imagine Klingon to be a (perhaps
extinct) Earth language. I'm not using this argument to claim one should
analyze it from the point of view of other Earth languages, but the grammar
is written as if it were a natural language. In this situations, other
linguists would doubt Okrands analysis and start to develop their own
analyses which may or may not make more sense.
This is what I am doing now. I didn't know about that section you quoted and
I am not sure if we really have to accept Marc Okrand's analysis, just
because he made the language. I know we have to take the canonical sentences
for granted. That's our corpus from which we can work.
Okrand said the prefixes for {-lu'} verbs indicate objects instead of
subjects. This is a valid claim and a possible analysis, but not the only
one. Unfortunately Okrand doesn't explain why he prefers this analysis
instead of the idea I had in mind (maybe he didn't think of that). But
perhaps I'm taking things too serious here. I rather judge from the way the
language works not from other linguists' analysis.

So I'm indeed injecting my own ideas here, which I'd call "analyses" rather
than just made-up ideas. We have the sentences as evidence and when looking
at the way {-lu'} obviously works, there are two ways of analyzing it. Mine
and Okrand's are different, but both are possible. If it's a common
agreement to stick to Okrand's analyses in these cases, even if they might
be less probable, then that's absolutely fine with me.

I still remain sceptical if {-lu'wI'} couldn't be possible, but I see your
point. If one has to trust Okrand's analyses, you're quite right. If one
doesn't have to, {-lu'wI'} constructions might be possible. The fact that we
don't have any canonical occurences in the corpus might be a (weak) hint
that Okrand's analysis is right. Of course the thing is the other way round:
Okrand constructed it and because he claimed the language to be like he
writes, he wouldn't write a sentence containing {-lu'wI'}.


>
> Flipped-around verb prefixes on verbs with {-lu'} don't change this:
>
>
I didn't say nor mean this would be the only function of {-lu'}, it's just
one of them. Imagine you'd only have the sentences with their translations
and would have to write a Klingon grammar on your own. Then it wouldn't be
so easy to decide if the prefixes change their function or if just the word
order is switched.



> 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'.}
>
>
Right, this is called an agent nominalizer. If Okrand wouldn't have added
the section you kindly cited some emails above, wouldn't it be possible that
{-lu'} verbs just cause a weird change in word order? Do you see any
evidence which would falsify this possible/theoretical analysis?

If I hadn't read that {leghbe'lu'wI'} (i.e. the unseen) word in ghIlghameS,
I wouldn't've'd the idea, probably. But of course, ghIlghameS isn't canon.


> 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").
>
>
Yes, that's always an option. I think this happened before with the word
order in sentences with {-jaj}. So I didn't solely derive this formula from
what I think Klingon works but from a non-canon sentence which I trusted
quite much. This gave rise to my own analysis of the syntax of {-lu'} verbs,
which contradicts Okrand's analysis. Unfortunately he just claims it in the
book, he didn't prove his claim. But because he's the inventor, he maybe
doesn't have to. :)
I don't think I'm too much relying on how the passive works in English. I
don't really see {-lu'} as a passive marker anymore. Just something vaguely
similar.

- André

Back to archive top level