tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Mar 20 01:13:42 1997

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Re: some tidbits qororvo'

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> >From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email protected]>
> >You can be afraid of doing something (which is what {-vIp} is for),
> >or you can be afraid of someone else doing something (which is when
> >the full verbs come handy).[...]
> >Even fear of being killed can't be expressed in such a way, since
> >Klingon has no passive.
> 
> [...]  I could see a language in which fear can only be expressed
> actively, with the most passive way of doing it something like
> "afraid of experiencing one's murder" or something, making it
> at least the partly active concept of "experiencing."

That sounds like some passive constructions that exist here and there.
You know, as in Vietnamese, where `X is killed by Y' is literally
`X suffer Y kill' (ie `X suffers Y's killing him=X').

> I think the fact that Klingon has -vIp at all does indicate a certain
> bias towards viewing fear as something connected with active actions.
> Or even a certain philosophical view of fear.

Would necessity, willingness and readiness be subject to the same
philosophical view then?  They're all expressed by modal suffixes.

> "HaghvIp" means "he/she is afraid to laugh," implying that [...]
> he/she doesn't laugh.

{HaghnIS}, {Haghqang} and {Haghrup} all carry the same implication.
So it doesn't have to be the Klingons' dislike of fear that makes it
special.  And it is special in many Terran languages, too, because of
the way the corresponding construction works: you say _be afraid to V_
if the subject of _V_ is the fearer; otherwise you use a sentential
complement (say, _be afraid that Y will/may V_).  I suspect (though
I'm not sure) that Hebrew uses the infinitive in the same-subject
construction and a subordinate clause in the different-subject one.
That's what Russian and Hungarian do, among others.

Now Klingon has suffixes for many things that other languages express
by separate words (and vice versa, of course).  Yet I've never seen a
Terran language with a suffix (or any sort of bound morpheme) for `be
afraid of'.  That's got to have some significance.

--'Iwvan

-- 
"reH Sov yInej 'ej Dap yImuS,          <dOstI bA mardom-e dAnA nEkO-st,
 jagh val qaq law' jup QIp qaq puS"     do^sman-e dAnA beh az nAdAn dOst>
                 (Sheikh Muslihuddin Abu Muhammad Abdullah Saadi Shirazi)
Ivan A Derzhanski                             <[email protected]>
H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria <http://www.math.acad.bg/~iad/>
W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences

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