tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Nov 15 11:49:27 1997
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Re: ghunlu'wI'
- From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: ghunlu'wI'
- Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 00:31:09 -0500
-----Original Message-----
From: William H. Martin <[email protected]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, November 14, 1997 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: ghunlu'wI'
>According to David Trimboli:
[...]
>> {Daleghlu'} "someone or something unspecified sees you"
>>
>> In English this sentence is equivalent in meaning to "you are seen."
>> There's only one way to write this meaning in Klingon, not two.
[...]
>But to say {vIqIplu'pu'} does not REALLY mean "I have been
>hit," because what it REALLY means is, "One has hit me," is one
>extremely weak argument. Excuse me, but these sentences have
>equivalent meaning and "I have been hit," is a much more
>natural method of expressing this thought in English. It does
>NOT have a different meaning. It merely has a different
>grammatical structure. English has two ways to say this and one
>of them is passive voice.
If you'll compare the above quoted posts you'll see that you are, in fact,
agreeing with me, and not disagreeing. I said that "One sees you"
[shortened from above] is equivalent to "you are seen," and you said "one
has hit me" is equivalent to "I have been hit." I compared English to
Klingon by saying that Klingon has only one way to express this, and you
compared English to Klingon by saying that English has two ways to express
this. These are all the same thing.
What we're disagreeing about is the use of the phrase "passive voice." You
say that transitively used verbs with {-lu'} may be called "passive voice."
If you care to do so, fine. All you're doing is applying a label. It
doesn't really tell us anything about the usage of the Klingon. In fact,
calling it such might be potentially harmful to beginners, who may try to
rely exclusively on English passive voice when creating their sentences, and
never consider sentences with active voice and indefinite subjects ("One
sees me"). When assisting beginners, I always found that banishment of the
term "passive voice" helped them to understand {-lu'} better.
As an advanced speaker, you may not be interested in such devices. (Myself,
I have learned the language this way, and have trouble thinking in terms of
Klingon passive voice.) Calling this style of speaking "passive voice" is
not incorrect.
As a side note, I've always been taught to avoid excessive English passive
voice in writing (not that I do so much, as evidenced by most of the
sentences in this post). It's just that: passive. It sounds weak. This is
probably purely a result of cultural taboo of overusing passive sentences in
writing, and not anything inherent in English itself (a guess on my part).
On the other hand, Klingon verbs with {-lu'} don't sound weak to me.
They're simply adding an extra syllable (and fiddling with a verb prefix) to
indicate that you don't know or don't need to know what the subject is.
Again, this difference is likely due to my learning to use {-lu'} using
English active voice constructions, rather than passive voice; but it's also
got to do with the fact that such constructions are important enough to have
their very own verb suffix.
SuStel
Stardate 97873.3