tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 30 21:31:19 1997

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Re: understanding {-lu'} (was Re: peDtaH 'ej jIQuch)

You seem to make much of "-lu' is the same as passive voice... except for
this change", charghwI'.  I'm a little surprised at this; since when do
you, of all people, find it necessary to define how Klingon does something
in terms of how English does it?  "-lu'" is -lu' and that's that.  I might
just as easily say that "-lu'" is *exactly* impersonal voice with the
slight change of the prefixes.  Neither description is necessarily better
or worse than any other.  It feels like the argument about whether Klingon
has 5 vowels or more (counting diphthongs as diphthongs or as
vowel+consonant).  It's all arguments about what words and labels you
choose to attach to things; it doesn't affect how they function.

"-lu'" is -lu' and nothing more.  It's... Gronculous voice, OK?  Not
passive, not active, not impersonal, just Gronculous.  And guess what,
Gronculous voice behaves JUST as we've seen -lu' behave.  I don't care what
you call things, look at the function.  In Gronculous voice, the subject of
the underlying sentence is taken to be indefinite.  That works in
transitive and intransitive cases equally well (*I* never found "ba'lu''a'"
strange because of this; Gronculous voice is pretty natural to me).  Is the
object of the underlying sentence promoted to subject?  I tend to think
not, owing to its position in the sentence, but the prefixes argue a little
differently.

So, WITHOUT using "passive voice" or "active voice" or other such
non-Klingon fictions (and that's all any language descriptions are:
convenient fictional labels), can someone tell me what the fuss is about?

~mark

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