tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Mar 04 15:12:10 1999
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Re: KLBC : revised bang bom mu'
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC : revised bang bom mu'
- Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 18:12:07 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
- Priority: NORMAL
On Thu, 4 Mar 1999 13:44:23 -0800 (PST) Marc Ruehlaender
<[email protected]> wrote:
> to charghwI' and ghunchu'wI'...
>
> I think there are several related but different issues
> adressed in your discussion. I'll try to seperate them.
>
> 1) the issue of more than one beneficiary
>
> consider the sentence: I made the girl give the knife to the officer.
> there is one beneficiary of the giving and one beneficiary of the causation.
... which can easily be expressed as two sentences with no
problem.
be'HomvaD taj vInobnIS. yaSvaD HIjnIS.
> of course I have a very good reason not to try to render that in Klingon :)
It doesn't have to be controversial or difficult, unless you try
to overload the grammar with things we've never been shown how
to do, like have two "beneficiaries" of different types
connected to the same verb.
> 2) the issue of ambiguity
>
> I think it is well established that there are ambiguous statements
> in Klingon. consider this: I make you kill for your friend's benefit.
Klingon has lots of ambiguity:
wej yaS vIHoH.
Did I kill three officers, or have I killed none yet?
Qe'Daq Sopbogh Qanqor vIlegh.
Am I in the restaurant, or is Krankor?
Meanwhile your example is ambiguous in English, but doesn't have
to be in Klingon:
juplI' vIQaHmeH qaHoHmoH.
juplI' DaQaHmeH qaHoHmoH.
> {qaHoHmoH} surely means "I make you kill", not "I have you killed",
> so {juplI'vaD qaHoHmoH} should be interpretable as "I make you kill
> for your friend's benefit."
You are ignoring Okrand's example on how transitive verbs
interact with {-moH}. What you described made sense until that
example. Meanwhile, what you describe is totally theoretical,
because, except for Okrand's one example which involves a
TRANSITIVE verb with {-moH}, there AREN'T any examples of verbs
used intransitively with a "beneficiary".
The grammar you describe may make sense to YOU, but it has
nothing to do with anything Okrand has ever given us. When you
apply {-moH} to a transitive verb, the grammar is fundamentally
different from when you apply it to an intransitive verb. You
are applying an intransitive verb grammar to your personal
theory of how it would handle a beneficiary.
Meanwhile, we have a concrete example from Okrand where the
"beneficiary" acted as the subject for the root verb's action
and direct object of the causation, and the direct object acted
as the direct object of the root verb's action, while the
subject acted as subject of the causation.
That's just plain weird, when viewed from all previous examples
of verbs with {-moH}, but then all THOSE verbs were INTRANSITIVE.
The grammar is different. That is my point.
> Of course, without further context, it
> would be read as "I make your friend kill you."
Exactly. So far as we know, there is no context that could make
it mean anything else. {-vaD} doesn't happen with an
intransitive verb plus {-moH}. At least, it never has and there
is no reason to suspect it ever would, since it would make
things quite confusing. It would be the worst thing to happen to
the language since {wej}.
> 3) the prefix trick and {-moH}
>
> here seems to be the core disagreement between ghunchu'wI' and
> charghwI' but I don't think I can say anything about it.
> It seems to work fine for me.
It works fine for me when there is a disagreement between the
person of the direct object and the indicated object in the
prefix. In this case, there is no direct object to disagree
with, so there is no disagreement, and with the explicit noun as
"beneficiary", the whole indirect concept here is being
overloaded.
Okrand has consistently handled "ditransitive" verbs by making
one of the object direct and the other indirect. Why do you
propose that he change that for this example?
> Marc Ruehlaender
> aka HomDoq
> [email protected]
>
charghwI' 'utlh