tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 10 10:31:47 1997
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Re: KGT confirmations
According to Alan Anderson:
>
> ja'pu' SuStel:
> >Whether Klingon linguists care at all about actually classifying transitive
> >and intransitive verbs as such is something I can't speak to . . .
>
> ja' HetaQ:
> >It does sound reasonable however I recall Marc saying, at qep'a' loSDIch
> >that there was no such thing as transitivity in Klingon. If I recall
> >correctly he seemed somewhat perturbed that the issue was still coming up.
>
> As I remember it, he said "There is no transitivity problem."
> Sorry, charghwI'. :-)
>
> -- ghunchu'wI'
No need to apologise to ME. I'm not the one you are correcting.
If you are apologising because because I'm interested in issues
concerning transitivity within the language, what I've come to
realize is that the term "transitivity" refers to an arbitrary
level of detail which seems less useful to me now than it once
did. Perhaps Okrand did this on purpose.
If we say a verb is transitive, we merely are saying that it
can take more than zero nouns as direct object. Meanwhile, to
really understand a verb, this is not very useful information
because we still don't know WHICH nouns can function well as
objects of any given verb.
Meanwhile, Okrand is not going to go back and explain every
verb in terms of listing its most likely appropriate object.
Besides being a massive amount of work, it would only serve to
limit him in his own future work.
Instead, he gives us an environment much like that of "real"
lexicographers. We can work from some old word lists which are
slowly becoming obsolete and we can observe the language in use
(by Okrand in canon) and we build our understanding of each verb
from the various contexts where it appears.
That's why the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) lists all those
old examples of use of words in English. So, I am absolutely
positive that verbs in Klingon exhibit the trait we refer to as
transitivity in that some are only intransitive and others are
only transitive and others can be used either way.
Okrand's word lists do not and never will contain notation
clearly showing whether verbs are transitive or intransitive,
but often the definition will suggest one or the other rather
strongly, and canon useage will help clarify the valid set of
nouns which can be objects of each verb.
lughtaHbogh charghwI'*
*Unless Okrand decides to make me wrong, that is...