tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 05 03:39:26 1995
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Re: Transitivity
On Thu, 4 May 1995 08:44:53 -0400, "Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]> said:
> Consider though how well the notion of such verb stems fits the
> Klingon "feel." It is certainly a good fit for converting to
> Clipped Klingon. No frills, no "function words" (function
> affixes?), just the bare bones of what you need to say.
Clipped Klingon does leave out some affixes, but that doesn't mean
that it has no grammar. Its configurational complexity is hardly
inferior to that of any other language.
> Of course, as speakers of a NOUN oriented language, we labor under
> our own problems. That's what is important to us, and when we look
> at verbs it seems as though it's only to ask how they impact on nouns
> (transitive? intransitive?) [...].
Let it be reminded here that English is not the only Terran language,
that many Terran languages are even more verb-oriented than Klingon,
and that the notion of transitivity is a universally relevant one.
Consequently it has nothing to do with the nounward orientation
of English.
> It may well be, as some have suggested, that the whole transitivity
> issue is really a non-issue from the Klingon point of view.
wejpuH. Let's go through this together.
Suppose a doctor kills an officer with a knife in the forest at night.
I can say (1),
(1) yaS HoH Qel.
but I can not say any of (2a-d) to describe the same situation.
(2) a. ngem HoH Qel.
b. ram HoH Qel.
c. taj HoH Qel.
d. Qel HoH yaS.
Why is this? Because in Klingon it is determined that the noun phrase
to the left of the verb {HoH}, whether or not it triggers agreement by
means of a prefix (Standard Klingon) or not (Clipped Klingon), must
refer to the victim, not the killer, the weapon, the time or the place.
(In linguistic terms, {HoH} assigns a thematic role to its object.)
So the definition of {HoH}, which the Klingon speaker has in his mind,
contains an explicit reference to the object. In other words, {HoH}
is a transitive verb.
Now, if you can demonstrate that every Klingon verb's definition
imposes similar restrictions on its object, then I'll agree that
every Klingon verb is transitive, which will amount to saying
that transitivity is not an issue in Klingon.
> [...] the fact that I have trouble getting good semantics out of a
> sentence like <HoD vIQong> might simply be *my* problem, not Klingon's,
It is not anyone's problem, any more than it is a problem that
_I sleep the captain_ makes no sense in English.
> particularly when the closest thing which I can come up with already
> exists in Klingon as <HoD vIQongmoH>.
That's just it. Even of you proclaim that {HoD vIQong} is to mean
the same as {HoD vIQongmoH}, you'll be left with the question why
{qagh vISop} and {qagh vISopmoH} don't mean the same thing.
--'Iwvan