tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 04 11:20:00 2007

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Giving and taking

Terrence Donnelly ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

--- Aaron Lewis <[email protected]> wrote:

> I wonder if these sentences are right.  I want to be
> sure that I understand
> "giving to", "taking from", "lending to", "borrowing
> from" and so on of.
> 
> puqvaD nIm vInob "I give the milk to the child"
> jIHvaD naH Danob "You give the fruit to me"
> SoHvo' jengva' vItlhap "I take the dish from you"
> vIngIp vIneH "I want to borrow it"
> SoHvo' vIngIp vIneH "I want to borrow it from you"
> jIHvaD Danojqang'a' "Are you willing to lend it to
> me?"
>

Some of those words have never been used in canon (eg.
{noj}), but I would accept all your sentences as
valid.

This might be a fun place to mention the "prefix
trick": if the subject and the beneficiary (the noun
with {-vaD}) of a verb are first or second person, and
the object of the verb is 3rd person, you can use the
verb prefix appropriate to the beneficiary _as if_ it
were the object. The only one of your sentences that
would qualify is {jIHvaD naH Danob}.  Using the prefix
trick, this could be written {naH chonob} with the
same meaning.

Note that you can't use this with 3rd person subjects
or beneficiaries, or 1st or 2nd person objects,
because the verb prefixes would be too ambiguous.
  
> aa.
> 

-- ter'eS

Back to archive top level