tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 05 14:26:17 1999

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Re: KLBC: Imperative prefixes



>Date: Thu, 05 Aug 99 20:28:18 EST
>Errors-To: [email protected]
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: "Nelson Lamoureux" <[email protected]>
>
>I was doing new tables for prefixes and suffixes when I realized that there
>are no 1st person plural subject imperative prefix in tlhingan Hol. I find
>this surprising. I'm not exactly sure about english, but I can assure you
>it's very present in french (and AFAIK in a number of other languages to).
>It seems this was deliberately done by MO (TKD 4.1.2), but why?

Ah, the "first-person imperative".  I once got a fair amount of objection
just for using the term, and I was just trying to refer informally to what
goes on in the French and stuff.  Yes, various languages have it, but it's
not always (and even rarely) a true "imperative" grammatically; oftenm it's
some other construction that has an idiomatic meaning attached.  In Hebrew,
it's just the future tense (which is similar to but not identical to the
true imperative, which is only defined in second person; there Hebrew uses
affixes to conjugate for the various persons too).  Esperanto uses the
actual imperative, mainly because t can owing to its verb structure.
English and Welsh (Modern Welsh anyway) and likely a lot of other languages
use an idiom based on the ordinary second-person imperative: "Let's go"
i.e. "let us go", grammatically a command to some unnamed addressee to
"permit" or otherwise approve of our going.  That's not the idiomatic
meaning, which is basically French "Allons!"; I think if you really want
the request it has to be done without the contraction ("let us go"
vs. "let's go".  Note that in English and French--but not in Esperanto--you
can't do this in first-person singular.  English "Lemme see" is more a
request than self-exhortation).

>    1.    (Lets go) Capture this guy! (meaning me and others will do the
>        capture, though I'm not sure it can be told, it sounds strange).
>
>In french I would say:
>
>    2.    Capturons ce gars ("capturons": to capture, 1st pers. plur.
>        imperative present).

Note that this works because the imperative in French is identical with
present tense (in normal verbs), just without the pronoun (in English it's
about the same, only with the infinitive--which is also used imperatively
in French (hmm, IS it the present tense form in English, or the imperative?
There's no telling, in regular verbs)).  I suppose it's not as simple as
that, though, since there are irregular verbs for which this isn't true;
that demonstrates that the "first-person imperative" really does have a
true existence in French.  Klingon's verb-conjugation system is more
complex than French's or English's; such a trick won't work.

Ah, so what about Klingon?  Obviously we don't have a prefix for it, and I
really doubt we'll get one at this point (c'mon a new verb PREFIX?  That
we've spent all this time not knowing about?)  There's been some discussion
on this before, in other contexts, and I have my favorite answers...

Option 1:  Basically translate the English idiom.  Almost certainly a lousy
idea; it rarely works (though the Welsh idiom is approximately the same as
the English; one very plikely borrowed from the other).  You could try
something like "qama' wIjon 'e' yIchaw'" or something like that.  But it
doesn't sound the least bit co-exhortive to me: it's definitely a request
for permission, so far as I can tell.  It's also mightily long-winded.

Option 2:  A lot of people have used -jaj for this purpose.  In fact, the
discussions touching on this problem before have generally been people
(like me) discouraging the use of  -jaj for this purpose.  Strangely, we
even have canon for this, and discouraged canon: recall the doomed Terran
in whichever tape it was saying "maja'chuqjaj" for "let's talk."  I don't
buy it.  -jaj is an expression of hope or wish, not a request or an order
or a suggestion.  "qama' wIjonjaj" sounds like "May it be so that we
capture the prisoner."  Not what we're after.

Option 3:  What I like and generally preferred by grammarians:  just say
what you mean!  "maja'chuq!":  we will talk.  "qama' wIjon" we go catch the
prisoner.  Context will have to provide the exhortative meaning, and it
just about always does.  I suppose you could also try "maja'chuqnIS", but
that's not quite the same thing.

So, I know I said MUCH more than I should have.  But that's my answer:
Just use the first person and have done with it.

~mark



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