tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 07 19:00:18 2012
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] voDleH Sut chu' (or, paghmo' tIn mIS)
ghItlhpu' loghaD, jatlh:
> SutvaD lubuSmoH[1]
(...poD)
> [1] ...or should it be ghaHvaD Sutvam lubuSmoH, as with qawmoH and ghojmoH?
I think so. De'vID and I exchanged a couple of messages not long ago on this
issue.
jang Qov, jatlh:
> That's certainly more understandable.
Qov jang loghaD, jatlh:
> I personally am a bit disappointed that this appears to be the standard
> practice. I rather enjoyed the idea of <tlhIngan HolvaD qaghojmoH> meaning
> something like "I direct your learning towards Klingon.
Intriguing, but there's no canon evidence for that pattern.
taH:
> Now, it feels like the English gloss for stem+moH is more important than the
> stem itself. qawmoH now means "cause something to be remembered", and ghojmoH
> "cause something to be learned".
I think the English glosses overcomplicate what's going on (and glosses are only
supposed to be a guide, anyway). All that happens is that qawmoH means not "X
causes-Y-to-learn", but "X causes-to-learn-Y". To me it actually makes more sense
that way, because it means that only one noun - the subject - has to be displaced
when you add {-moH}.
To step outside the game for a minute, exactly this pattern happens in a lot of
Earth languages. In fact, AFAIK it's the more common pattern in languages with
morphological causatives, and it wouldn't shock me if MO invented the Klingon
version on the basis of one of those. Here's an example in Ubykh, which also has
a productive causative affix:
Non-causative:
atEt azbyan "I see the man"
(atEt "the man", in absolutive case = direct object)
Causative:
atEt sEwdEbyan "you make me see the man"
(atEt has a zero agreement prefix, but is still absolutive case = direct object)
With the oblique-case form of "the man", it means something totally different:
atEtEn sEwdEbyan "you make the man see me".
QeS 'utlh
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