tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Nov 05 22:03:34 2005

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Re: chenmoH/mojmoH (was Re: Klingon WOTD: cho' (verb))

QeS la' ([email protected]) 

ghItlhpu' lay'tel SIvten, ja':
>In English (in fact, everything except Klingon), "be", "become", "seem",
>etc., don't take objects, but rather predicate nominatives, linked with the
>subject by the copula.

OK, I concede that point. The fact remains, though, that {moj} in Klingon, 
like English "seem", cannot generally exist alone, only with an accompanying 
noun or pronoun: an accusative/objective noun in Klingon, but a predicate 
nominative (?) in English (even that last seems a bit odd to me, because "he 
became me" would be normal for most speakers rather than ??"he became I").

But "everything except Klingon" may be a bit wide. I'll have to do some 
checking, but I can think of at least one Terran language (namely, Abkhaz) 
that I'm pretty sure has a transitive verb "to be", and would therefore, I 
guess, lack a true copula according to that definition; it's off-topic, 
though, so I'll say no more about it here.

jIjang, jIja':
>I wouldn't accept {jImoj} as "I become, I come into existence"
>(which is what I get from the intransitive sense of the English verb
>"become" - you just can't say *"He came into existence my manager").
>Again, I think there may be confusion between "be" (intransitive, "to
>exist") and "be" (transitive/copular).

mujang lay'tel SIvten, ja':
>"Transitive and "copular" are mutually exclusive.  If it's one, it can't 
>also
>be the other.

If there are languages that have transitive "to be"-verbs, is that then 
considered to be lacking a copula? (I'm not intending to be inflammatory 
with this; I just want to sort this out in my own head.)

ghItlhpu' Stephen Carter, ja':
>Until new canon shows otherwise, I'll assume that {moj} is used only with 
>people, and that {mojmoH} isn't synonymous with {chenmoH},
>but may be synonymous with pronoun + {-choH}.

No, what I said was that pronoun + {-choH} was synonymous with {moj}. 
Pronoun + {-choHmoH} would be synonymous with {mojmoH}: {DevwI' 
ghaHchoHmoH}, {DevwI' mojmoH} "he makes him become the leader".

Stephen Carter jangmeH ghItlhtaH, ja':
>Wouldn't they have different usages?  The subject and object of {mojmoH} 
>would be person A causing person B to become (thing/person C (e.g., 
>position, title)),

Or person A causing an unspecified someone or something to become 
thing/person C. Canon indicates that the "object" pronoun prefixes in 
causative verbs can apparently refer to either the object of the causation 
or the object of the main verb.

Savan,

QeS la'
taghwI' pabpo' / Beginners' Grammarian


not nItoj Hemey ngo' juppu' ngo' je
(Old roads and old friends will never deceive you)
     - Ubykh Hol vIttlhegh

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