tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Dec 20 06:41:12 1994
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Re: vay' and lu'
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: vay' and lu'
- Date: Tue, 20 Dec 94 9:41:08 EST
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "Marc Ruehlaender" at Dec 20, 94 2:54 am
According to Marc Ruehlaender:
>
> maHvaD ghoSlI'ghach ja'pu' marqoS:
> (2Qs: is this grammatically correct?
> and does it convey the intended meaning?)
"Marcus has told us the ..."? The noun {ghoSlI'ghach} is going
to lose most of your audience. [It lost ME.] The verb {ghoS} is
already difficult enough to translate into English, especially
when it has no direct object, and ESPECIALLY when it is being
used in an abstract sense. Now, you take this multifunction
verb and then try to figure out how to nominalize the
progressive form of it, considering that there are several
different ways to nominalize a verb? I suspect you may find
another word to more simply fit your meaning, like
{jabbI'IDvam} with perhaps the verb {lab}, like:
jabbI'IDvam nulabpu' marqoS:
> > \ I think vay' is the only way to express an unspecified
> > \ OBJECT, or could you simply use the ...-it prefixes?...
> >
> > -marqoS
> ... but then vay' IS the only way of expressing
> _unspecified_ (in the above sense) objects, while
> unspecified subjects could as well be expressed by -lu'.
>
> Is that so?
>
> Marc 'Doychlangan'
This is a point of contention. If you believe that {Xlu'} = {X
vay'}, then you are right. My own suspicion is that, as the
language was being developped, Okrand may have recognized that
the grammar allowed objects to be optional, while subjects were
necessary, and this created problems when translating English
passive voice.
Since much of the language was developed while Okrand sought to
express all the lines in the movies spoken by Klingons (even if
they said it in English, because he knew that the director
might change change his mind and ask for it to be redone in
Klingon), and all the English lines spoken by Klingons in TOS
television episodes (in English), it is certain that he had to
deal with the English passive voice.
Meanwhile, trying to make the language more alien, he would
certainly not want an exact equivalent to the passive voice.
Still, I strongly suspect that {-lu'} was specifically designed
to handle the translation of English passive voice, whether or
not it was intended to be the exact equivalent of it. In
English, the passive voice functions as a verb with an
unspecified subject. In English, there is no equivalent
grammatical construction to passive voice intended to address
an unspecified object, so Okrand did not need to solve that
problem with a grammatical construction.
This suspicion combines with that one weird TKD example
{HeghqangmoHlu'pu'} = "it made him/her willing to die" to make
me think that the {-lu'} moves the "willingness" implied by
{-qang} from the subject "it" to the object "him/her" in a way
that {HeghqangmoHpu' vay'} would not have done. In fact, I think
that "it made him/her willing to die" is really better stated
as "He/She was caused to be willing to die." The latter better
expresses the sense of an unspecified subject, and it happens
to be in the passive voice.
Of course, only Okrand knows for sure, and so far, he is not
talking.
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Marc Ruehlaender [email protected]
> Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, Germany
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
charghwI'
--
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