tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 16 18:07:37 2001
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Re: -vo'
ja' Qov:
>Re: -vo' for verbs of perception:
>
>Maybe it's because I'm studying ASL at the moment, but I don't find much of
>a difference between
>
>Hurvo' Qe'Daq jIjaH
>and
>Hurvo' Qe'Daq jIlegh
I do see a difference. {jaH} is definitely about motion, but {legh} is
just as definitely about perception. There's an implication of
perceiver-centric thought in some of the vocabulary we have: {wIb} "be
sour" is explained as being closer to "sour-inducing", for example. So it
seemed to me at first that Klingons might consider that seeing happens *to*
the seer, with the action going *from* the seen.
>The action of the sentence - seeing - is in a direction away from the
>outside, towards the restaurant. Yes, the action that makes sight possible
>is really light travelling from the restaurant to the observer's eye, but
>the race that makes that discovery before having established vocabulary
>that deals with sight is uncommunicative indeed.
I think I've shown that there's a different way to arrive at the "from seen
to seer" idea which doesn't require knowing the details of light's motion.
However, the {pa'vo' pagh leghlu'} example does tell us that seeing from a
location is a valid concept, so my theory about Klingon perceptual concepts
doesn't hold. Even if it still sounds a little "off" to me, there isn't
any reason for me to reject using {-vo'} to refer to the location of the
person doing the seeing if they're looking somewhere else.
>Question is: yotlhvo' vIlargh - Am I in the field, or is the source of the
>odour? I think we have the same ambiguity in English.
That's exactly how I'm treating it now.
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh