tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 01 18:06:44 1998

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Re: KLBC: Q on {-meH} (was: long weekend with MO)

At 01:58 PM 6/1/98 -0700, HomDoq wrote:
>
>ter'eS, Voragh and charghwI' discuss the following sentences
>(with respect of indefinite subject "it")
[...]
>Now, I've seen this before, and I never quite understood, how
>the being difficult/easy/whatever is done for a purpose.
>
>(*It is difficult in order to fight the officer.
>*It is difficult in order to hit.
>*It is easy in order to speak Klingon.)
>
>This is quite obviously not what is meant here.
>Can I please have a summary of how the meaning of {-meH}
>is extended by Okrandian usage?
>

Others have given good answers to this; I just want to add some observations.
These formations might be considered ways to work around the absence of a
Klingon Sentence-As-Subject form.  The English phrase "It is X to Y" is
really a paraphrase for the more direct "Y is X".  When Y is a sentence,
it is logically a sentence as subject.  For example, "It is difficult to
fight the officer" is logically the same as "To fight the officer is
difficult".  The phrase "To fight the officer" is a verb phrase functioning
as a noun phrase and acting as the subject of "is difficult".

Klingon has no corresponding construction.  Way back when, I believed that
{-ghach} was more of a grammatical suffix than a lexical one, and I once
proposed the form *{Qatlh yaS Suvghach}, with {yaS Suvghach} as the subject
of {Qatlh}, as a way to form sentence as subject phrases.  Of course, we now 
know this is completely wrong.

As time has gone on, we've come to rely more and more on the {-meH} construction
to recast SAS phrases, as in {yaS SuvmeH Qatlh (Qu')}. As Qov
has pointed out, the subject seems optional in the {-meH} phrase, but is
presumably the speaker or someone to which the speaker is referring. 

In charghwI's recent post about his boating trip, he 
used the phrase {ngeD tlhe'meH Qu'}.  Far from being an impersonal use,
this is almost the antithesis of an impersonal phrase.  Here 
he is using {tlhe'meH Qu'} like a noun compound, and making it the subject of
{ngeD}: "The (task of turning) is easy".  I hadn't seen this before, and I
like it.  It seems to clarify what we're doing with {-meH} in these sentences. 

It seems to me that Klingon has 4 means to express the impersonal:

1. suffix {-lu'}
2. pronoun {net}
3. constructions with {-meH} that modify nouns and don't take verb prefixes
(eg. in a phrase like {ghojmeH taj}, where the subject is unclear: "a knife
so that (who?) learns".)
4. simply omitting the subject. It appears from voragh's canon sources and
Okrand's
{SIS} example that this is a legitimate form, but I'm sort of sorry it is.  I
liked the absence of this "simple" impersonal.  In fact, the existence of
{-lu]} and {net}, far from implying that impersonals were common, to me
implied that they were unusual and required special constructions to form.
I liked having to come up with an explicit subject for almost all sentences.
It seemed more Klingon to me.  

Oh well, I think I'm rambling a bit.  If none of this answers your question,
then never mind.

-- ter'eS

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