tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Mar 09 18:33:58 1997

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Re: more on -moH qororvo'



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>Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 08:24:08 -0800 (PST)
>From: "HurghwI'" <[email protected]>
>
>jatlh ~mark:
>>>	Dubotchugh yIpummoH.
>>>	If it's in your way, cause it to fall.  (passive)
>>
>>I still don't see any passive/active anything, except what you choose to
>>impose on it.  "pum" means "to fall".  "To move downward unsupported under
>>the influence of gravity."  Stuff like that.  "yIpummoH" is "cause it to
>>fall."  Cause the action of falling to happen with it.  Where's passive or
>>active?
>
>There's been a lot of talk lately about this, so I want to get one thing
>straight:
>passive, I thought, was when the verb is a "be verb," like "It is happy,"
>"The object is falling," or "The book is sitting on the table."

Actually, no.  Properly speaking, those are at best stative, not passive.
Passive voice means "The book was eaten" or "the apple was dropped".  See?
There's an action being done by SOMETHING ELSE and the subject of the
sentence is really the OBJECT of an active form of the sentence ("the book
was eaten by the targ" is a passive form of "the targ ate the book"; in
passive form the eatee is more emphasized and the eater can be left out.)
"The book is falling" isn't the passive of any other formulation; you can't
change that sentence with the same verb where the book is now the object.
It's just the present progressive form, and quite, quite active (you
wouldn't say "The crazed animal is killing the prisoners" is passive would
you?)  "It is happy" is more stative; it's using the word "is" to link an
adjhective to the subject, indicating a state, but it's not passive.  "It
is on the table" is certainly not passive either; it indicates the state of
the book.

All of which is rather beside the point.  Klingon does NOT have a true
passive.  It just and simply doesn't.  It has an impersonal, which can
serve a similar function, but grammatically it remains an active voice: the
object remains grammatically an object, it remains in the object place, and
doesn't get promoted to subject (as the book did when it "was eaten" by the
targ).  Even "be honored", which *is* actually a passive construction in
English (Jack honors Jill / Jill is honored [by Jack]) is just that:
passive IN ENGLISH.  In Klingon it is as active as "be happy" or "be flat":
it indicates a state of being.

~mark

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