tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 09 04:52:22 1994
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Klingon math, et al
>From: [email protected]
>Date: Tue, 09 Aug 94 14:37:39 EDT
>>>[The question mark is because {QuS} REALLY doesn't seem like a
>>>very transitive verb, yet a {-lu} suffix ALWAYS implies an
>>>object. Similarly, {SuD} listed as "gamble, take a chance, take
>>>a risk" becomes "In order that one gambles it" or "in order
>>>that it is gambled". I transformed this "it" into the "risk"
>>>that
>>>is "taken". Of the entire translation, {QuSlu'meH} seems the
>>>strangest choice of words.]
>>Not quite true. "-lu'" need not imply an object. It only implies that the
>>*subject* is indefinite. You can have an indefinite subject and no object.
>>It's basically like replacing the subject with "vay'". Indeed, we have
>>canonical evidence: in TKD, in the phraselist, we have "quSDa[q]
>>ba'lu''a'?" (typo: there's a Q instead of a q). This is given as "Is this
>>seat taken?" Literally, it's "Is someone/something sitting in the seat" or
>>even "Is it being sat in the chair?" Sanskrit, which has a real passive,
>>has no problem saying things like "In the forest it is happily lived by the
>>hermits". Don't mistake indefinite subject for a required object.
>I don't know about that, since whenever {-lu'} is used, the prefix gets
>flopped. It still seems to me that a grammatical object must somehow be
>involved. What {quSDaq ba'lu''a'} says to me is that {ba'} takes a kind of
>object, but that object must be locative. The sentence comes out as "Is this
>seat being sat *in*?" What {QuSlu'} says to me is that {QuS} is mayhaps
>transitive. In that case, it is just as appropriate as {jatlhlu'} or
>{tlhoblu'}.
Not "whenever"; look again. Okrand says specifically that it happens with
vI- Da- bo- and wI- and lu-. He *doesn't* say "whenever"; just when it's
1st- or 2nd- person, and lu-. If "ba'" were transitive, meaning "sat in",
then the object would be... well, the object! If it's in the locative
place, it's not the object. That's what case-markings are for. What
evidence have we for a verb that is transitive whose object has "-Daq"
tacked on? Not without a really creative definitivon of "object" and
"transitive", I think!
~mark