tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 29 01:13:16 2011
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Loose Klingon
jatlhpu' SuStel:
> The semantic roles of subjects and objects in Klingon seem to change
> all the time. I can {mev}, I can {mev} you, making you you {mev}.
tlhob De'vID, jatlh:
> Where has {mev} been used in the sense of {mevmoH}?
bIjatlh 'e' yImev. yItlhutlh!
Stop talking! Drink! (TKW p.87)
To be honest I don't see these verbs as that much of a problem. Lots of
languages have small and select groups of these kinds of "ambitransitive"
verbs. English, for instance: burn, break, drown, choke, scatter, fly,
boil, fry... Ubykh has them too, so they're not an English-only thing.
They're a little frustrating, but they're absolutely typical of natural
Terran languages and I'm not surprised to see a few such verbs appearing
in Klingon. Whether Marc's doing them deliberately or not is, of course,
another story, but I don't have a problem with them and I think there's
no reason for us to start wondering about the looseness of argument
structure of *all* Klingon verbs as a result.
taH:
> I can't think of any examples where the semantic roles of subjects and
> objects have changed. We recently learned that {vergh} is transitive
> (someone docks something), when some people have assumed it was
> intransitive (the ship docks).
{meQ} "burn" is one, which we have attested with an object, with a non-
agent subject, and as an adjectival.
QeS 'utlh
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