tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Dec 14 11:52:59 1994

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Re: -lu'



>Date: Wed, 14 Dec 1994 01:28:16 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: [email protected]

>ghItlhta' charghwI':
>>First, apparently the omission of 3rd person in the passive
>>voice description was intended to allow the potential for the
>>use of passive voice with an intransitive verb, like ba'lu'.
>>"One sits." There is no way to translate that into a passive
>>construction in English.

>>Still, whenever the verb is transitive, evidence is strong that
>>the passive voice is called for, even with the third person. In
>>addition to making the subject indefinite, most canon examples
>>of {-lu'} also shift the focus to the object to such an extent
>>that the meanings of the suffixes get applied to the object
>>instead of the subject.

>This is exactly where we diverge opinion-wise on {-lu'}. It is my personal
>belief that you have so much influence from the concept of passive in English
>that you transfer that onto the way you think of {-lu'}, as do many people.
>That's not your fault, but I try to look at {-lu'} much more non-objectively.
>Nothing in TKD really suggest that {-lu'} has anything to do with passive.
>The prefixes get flopped (I use 'flopped' only while looking for a better
>word), but that happens in many languages, and is not the same as transposing
>the patient to the syntactic position of subject, since the patient of a
>{-lu'} verb in Klingon is still syntactically an object.

OK, folks... I think this may be a tempest in a teapot.  Okrand, we know,
despite his making Klingon different from many languages, really, deep
down, kept a lot of normal linguistic things in it (Nick will tell you how
weird it *could* have been).  "-lu'" is pretty clearly a form that occurs
in a whole lot of languages: the "impersonal".  Yes, properly speaking,
"Xlu'" really expands to "X vay'".  And yes, that means that you can use
"-lu'" on intransitive verbs (which we've seen in cannon).  Many languages
that have impersonal forms usually use them as the closest they have to a
passive voice (cf Welsh, or the Esperanto use of "oni Xas ion" instead of
the lengthier "io estas Xata").

So, is "-lu'" truly a passive voice?  I guess not.  Does that mean you
shouldn't translate with a passive?  Not at all!  Often, the closest
English sentence to a sentence in Klingon using "-lu'" is in passive.  Just
like we often have to use past tense which isn't indicated in the Klingon,
or explicit pronouns which aren't there, it is often best to translate
Klingon sentences in -lu' with the English passive.  Note that's "often",
not "always."  Nor does that mean that "-lu'" "is" a passive voice.  It
just means it's *often translated as* one.  See the difference?

>You said that in most canon examples using {-lu'}, the suffixes apply more to
>the object than the indefinite subject. Well, let's examine the verb suffixes
>that apply to nouns, specifically the syntactic subject: type 2's, and one
>type 5 {-laH}. Of course, examining {-laH} is useless, since it never goes
>with {-lu'}. But the type 2's may offer insight. Only one canon example uses
>{-lu'} with a type 2:

>{HeghqangmoHlu'pu'} = "it made him/her willing to die" (TKD pg 45)

>The "it" in his translation is not in the Klingon. We can all observe this
>very confidently. If the "it" were changed to "something," then that would be
>a satisfactorily more accurate translation? In this case the {-qang} would
>apply to the syntactic object anyways, since the verb {HeghqangmoH} literally
>means "cause X to be willing to die," where X is the object and the noun to
>which {-qang} really applies. There are no other examples like this, so
>insight on {-lu'} used with type 2's goes only so far. But we do have
>{ba'lu'} as a canonical verb, showing that intransitives do take {-lu'}. As
>much as some people may not like it, that's canon, and it does fit in with
>the grammar as a whole. {-lu'} has little to do with the object.

>[Side note: Those who observe that since {HeghqangmoH} means "cause to be
>willing to die" might wonder how one translates "be willing to cause to die."
>{HeghmoHqang} is ungrammatical, so in Klingon "cause to be willing to die"
>and "be willing to cause to die" are both {HeghqangmoH} with context sorting
>out which meaning is meant. This applies to all verbs using {-moH} and a type
>2 suffix.]

True.  Thus -qang can (and does) apply to either the grammatical subject or
object when used with -moH, so I'm not sure how it argues for or against
either position.  Then again, I don't truly see the difference between the
purported positions either.

>Okrand's descriptions often backfire when he says something about how Klingon
>might be translated. Saying {-lu'} is often translated with passive in
>English has lead some to believe that {-lu'} is passive. But the truth is
>that it's meaning often (but not always) corresponds to the *semantic* value
>expressed by passive in English. Nowhere does he imply a *grammatical*
>relation between {-lu'} and passive voice.

Well, said, and I wouldn't even go that far.  The English passive is *close
to* (but isn't) -lu'.  The Klingon impersonal is *often* (not always) best
expressed with the English passive.

~mark


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