tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Sep 12 13:51:44 1996

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Re: Having heard through Power Klingon...

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>Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 11:14:05 -0700
>From: Nick Nicholas <[email protected]>

>>> 3. To my exasperation, PK has both transitive and intransitive usages 
>>> of "tagh". Here's hoping this is not a general trend...
>>I thought {tagh} was already clearly transitive from the "initiate"
>>gloss.  The fact that it can be used intransitively as well is
>>convenient - too much so.

>The canon for this is "mu'qaD veS taghlu'bej". I don't now remember if tagh 
>was used transitively in PK, now; but it's definitely so used in TKW.

Actually, the PK cannon is "taghbej mu'qaD veS"; *in*transitive usage.  I
am not sure if transitive usage is attested, but I think it may be.

I can live with it going both ways, so long as it's the exception and not
the rule.

>My own strategy has been Volap"ukian --- assume intransitive by defualt, 
>because -moH is well-defined, and we don't have any consistent 
>intransitivisers. But you know, I think what's really happening with us 
>Klingonists is that there's so many Esperantists and Lojbanists here, we 
>expect well-defined verb valency. It is a sad Englishishism --- but English is 
>far from the only language which has verbs behaving both transitively and 
>intransitively. Like I say, let's hope it stays a one-off; the vem/vemmoH type 
>pairs in the dictionary should guarantee that.

By "one-off" I take it you mean that it's one of the few that does it?  It
doesn't really make sense for Klingon to do what English does regularly,
not with -moH and all those examples.  English may not be the only language
that does it, but it is a distinctively English feature, and Okrand likes
to avoid those.

~mark

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