tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Mar 14 09:35:24 1999
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Re: KLBC: more practice
ja' DloraH:
>>qalatlh. I'm speaking to you.
>
>typo... qajatlh
>
>can the object of jatlh be a person.
>I thought it was a thing spoken (speech, language; not a quote)
>and the object of ja' [can be/is] the person
>?
Okrand addressed this in detail on the old MSN expert forum a couple of
years ago. He clarified what the "true" object of {jatlh} can be, but
he also explained quite a lot about the "prefix trick". At the end of
his explanation, he wrote:
| ...Since the object of jatlh is
| that which is spoken, and since "you" or "I" or "we" cannot be spoken (and
| therefore cannot be the object of the verb), if the verb is used with a
| pronominal prefix indicating a first- or second-person object, that first
| or second person is the indirect object.
|
| Which is a not very elegant way of saying that qajatlh means "I speak to
| you" or, more literally, perhaps "I speak it to you," where "it" is a
| language or a speech or whatever:
-- ghunchu'wI'