tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu May 04 07:10:17 1995
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Re: Transitivity
- From: [email protected] (David Barron)
- Subject: Re: Transitivity
- Date: Thu, 4 May 1995 07:10:12 -0700
At 10:09 PM 5/3/95 -0400, [email protected] wrote:
>This one should draw some comments!!!
>
>I have never seen anything quite like what I am about to say, but here goes.
>
>Perhaps Klingons do not think of Klingon language verbs as being transitive
>or intransitive at all. Transitivity is implied not by the verb roots
>themselves but by pronomial verb prefixes. Klingons can tell whether a verb
>has an object and use one set of prefixes or whether a verb does not have an
>object and use a different set of prefixes. The verb root itself never
>changes.
It could be that , indeed, Klingon does not acknowledge transitivity.
Instead, they might recognize verbs as being "stative" (those that are
traslated as "be <verb>" and non-stative. This would explain the
existance of the -moH suffix, which one adds to stative verbs like
qIj "be black" to get qIjmoH "blacken".
All this is speculation, of course, and there exist some decent
counter-arguments to this (but I can't think of them right now).
This could well be one of the things we add to the Okrand Question
List.
David
David Barron [email protected] OR [email protected]
Klingon Language Postal Course, PO Box 37, Eagle ID 83616
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