tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Oct 12 19:21:22 2009
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Re: The meaning of -moH
Interestingly, one sleeps when one is in a particular state. If I
sleep, then I am sleeping. The definition could as easily been "be
asleep" or "be sleeping", in which case, we could use it as an
adjective, and it would be just like {tIn} or {bIr}.
One thing to watch for when focusing a bit much on syntax vs. syntax
when referring to direct objects is that it is easy to put too much
weight on the ENGLISH syntax of a given verb. If the gloss were an
imperfect attempt to convey the meaning of a verb, then we could
easily get confused about whether a given verb could take an object,
and if so, what kind of object. Meanwhile, as imperfect as the glosses
are, they usually stand alone in explaining words to us, since we have
so little canon.
Doq
On Oct 8, 2009, at 8:12 AM, ghunchu'wI' wrote:
> 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'
>
>
>