tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Dec 30 02:26:43 1994

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Re: -lu'

Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Mark E. Shoulson jay'?

toH, Hochra', tuqaw'a'? QonoS jabbI'IDmeywIj vISang neH, *Sydney*Daq 
jItlheDpa'. qaSDI' DIS chu' jaj, pa' jItlheD. qaStaHvIS cha' jar, pa'
jIghun. jIghunmeH, LISP vIlo'. not LISP vIlo'pu', 'a pIj PROLOG vIlo'pu'.
PROLOG vIparHa'. 'functional languages' (mI'QeD De'wI'Hol) vIparHa'qu' je.
'ach LISP vIparHa'qu'be'. nap pabDaj, 'a napqu'mo' berghmoH je. 'ej
Common LISP vIlo'nIS; 'libraries' law' lo'moHmo' Hol Sarvetlh, napHa'.

yap.

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

=>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.

I feel I should underline this, since Will brought it into question: the
*only* defined difference between the impersonal and the passive is
syntactic. In the impersonal, the object of a verb remains the object, and
the subject is blanked out; in a passive, the object becomes the subject,
and the subject pops up as an oblique. In that respect, Klingon has an
impersonal, and it's not halfway anything.

Now, this does not decide matters one way or the other with -qang, because
if languages are one thing, they're quirky. The safest bet is to surmise
that the scope of -qang is in fact ambiguous, with HoHqanglu' meaning either
'someone's willing to kill' or 'someone's willing to be killed'. (That
alleged paragon of logic, Esperanto, is gloriously ambiguous as to whether
its equivalent of -moH after transitive verbs makes the base verb passive
or active: you can say both

mi mangxigis al la cxevalo herbon
'ervaD tI vISopmoH

or

mi mangxigis la cxevalon per herbo
'er vISopmoH, tI vIlo'taHvIS

This kind of thing happens, and it's allowed. Granted, if I had to pick
*one* alternative, I'd pick Guido against anti-Guido (it'd be inaccurate
to claim the anti-Guido position is charghwI''s.) But canon doesn't argue
much of anything with that -moH- getting in the way; and we quite simply
can't choose one way or the other.

=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).  

Oh, a favourite topic of mine. It keeps cropping up again and again, too;
Mark and d'Armond will both have horror tales to tell of my extremely broad
usage of both 'e' and -meH. The 'e' often has little to do with English;
it's pure Lojban. The -meH is an artifact of how I looked at Klingon, and
I don't think there's any language's finger involved, but the confusion
my usage raised in Hamlet showed that, when you do wander away from English,
you also wander away from what Okrand actually has built into the language
--- not that you can help but stray, when the corpus says so little...

-- 
 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
 Nick Nicholas. Melbourne University, Aus. [email protected]
                                    ---
"Some of the English might say that the Irish orthography is very Irish.
Personally, I have a lot of respect for a people who can create something so
grotesque."
-- Andrew Rosta <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>

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