tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Oct 08 05:14:31 2009
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Re: The meaning of -moH
On Oct 7, 2009, at 6:52 PM, David Trimboli wrote:
> The text tells us we can put objects on verbs, but it never tells us
> when we *can't* do it.
It comes close, though. When introducing verb prefixes, the example
verb is {Qong} "sleep" and only the no-object prefixes are listed.
The text then goes on to say that those prefixes are also used when
an object is possible but not stated. I infer from the wording that
such prefixes are *not* used with {Qong}. I agree that nothing
explicitly says that there is a rule against it, but there is some
support in TKD for saying that an object on {Qong} is not possible.
The semantics vs. syntax distinction is a little fuzzy, but I'm
leaning toward this being a syntactical feature. The problem of
being able to know which verbs have the syntactical restriction is a
persistent one, though.
> There *is* a distinction between verbs of quality
> and verbs of action,...
With the {Qong} prefix example, there is also an apparent category of
non-quality verbs which don't take objects.
-- ghunchu'wI'