tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 16 17:44:13 1999
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Re: Klingon WOTD: baj (v)
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 16:29:29 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
>
>On Tue, 16 Nov 1999 17:55:13 +-300 Carleton Copeland
><[email protected]> wrote:
>
>~mark dealt with 1) as well as I did, but I think he missed your
>problem with 2):
You're right, I may have missed his difficulty.
>You can use {-lu'} on intransitive verbs. It doesn't really jive
>with the interaction of {-lu'} and the verb prefix on transitive
>verbs, but then, so what? Language doesn't always have to jive.
>Sometimes the rules simply have exceptions. So, both {ba'lu'}
>and {yInlu'} are valid. Deal with it.
See, I didn't find this so tough, because it only fails to make sense from
the POV of some languages. I've worked in languages where it's quite
natural to use the impersonal or even "passive" on intransitives. A word
like "daethpwyd" might be a little formal for colloquial Welsh, but it's
normal enough in literature. It's the impersonal form of the verb "to
come"; I've seen it translated as "there was a coming" (it's actually
*impersonal* voice, as we are told that Klingon -lu' is, not technically
the same as passive). To be sure, it's used to express something
transitive in meaning: the common way of saying "to bring X" is literally
"to come with X". So "daethpwyd a+ llyfr" is "there was a coming with a
book, it was come with a book", i.e. "a book was brought." A more telling
example is in Sanskrit, where "passive" voice, or karma.ni prayoga, is
pretty much interchangeable semantically with active. This applies also to
intransitive verbs (in which case it's actually bhaave prayoga), and just
for simplicity you conjugate the verb in third-person singular passive
(since there's no object to guide the number/person of the verb, you have
to pick something). So you can quite easily find "raajabhi.h sukha.m
jiivyate"/"it is lived happily by kings" (i.e. "kings live happily") or
even "apyetasmin aasana aasyate?"/"is it sat in this seat" (in actual
passive voice, not like it looks in English. Really the passive voice of
"to sit" (NOT "to seat").)
~mark