tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 02 13:32:06 2003
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Re: Opposite of -wI'
I'm not at my usual mailer, so I can't do a proper "reply", but I saw
someone was looking for my reasoning for forbidding "*-lu'wI'". Without
searching the archives, here is what I think (and it probably is what I
thought back then as well).
A Klingon verb has a subject place and (possibly) an object place. What
does "-wI'" do? It turns the verb into a construction that means "a noun
which fills the subject place of this verb." So there's sort of this
placeholder in the "subject" place that marks the subject of the verb and
acts as the head-noun in the matrix clause (the words surrounding the -wI'
construction "see" only that noun-place).
What does "-lu'" do? It does not change the verb into something noun-like,
but it does indicate that the subject place is occupied by a "something
indefinite". So "HoHlu'" is "HoH"/kills and the subject is something I am
not interested in telling you about. You can see this happen with
intransitive verbs too, as in "Heghlu'meH" and "quSDaq ba'lu''a'?" It
doesn't make sense in English ("*Is it being sat in this chair?") but it
does in Klingon--and in Sanskrit for that matter ("In the forest it was
happily lived by the monks" is a sensible construction in Skt).
So there we have a problem. Both -wI' and -lu' fill in the subject place
of the verb, and they fill it in different ways. -lu' fills it with
something indefinite, while the placeholder used by -wI' is, if anything,
particularly definite, since it's what the rest of the sentence is talking
about. And so the dilemma: we're trying to squeeze two *different* things
into the same subject place (without any sort of conjunction, mind you:
they both are to be the sole subject). And that's really it: you can't
cram them both in. You can't add -wI', because -lu' has already filled in
the subject place.
Similarly, *vIlabwI' and *choHaghmoHwI', I would say, are not sensible
words (outside of wordplay in poetry).
~mark