[Tlhingan-hol] Loose Klingon

[De'vID jonpIn]

jatlhpu' SuStel:

> > The semantic roles of subjects and objects in Klingon seem to change
> > all the time. I can {mev}, I can {mev} you, making you you {mev}.
>

tlhob De'vID, jatlh:

> > Where has {mev} been used in the sense of {mevmoH}?
>

QeS 'utlh:
>
> bIjatlh 'e' yImev. yItlhutlh!
> Stop talking! Drink! (TKW p.87)
>

Interesting.  Intuitively, when I scan the sentence I don't immediately
think of {mev} as taking {'e'} as the object here, but of course it
actually is.    Instead, I see {yImev} "(you) stop!" and I understand it as
a command to the listener, and only then does my brain attach the {bIjatlh
'e'} "... talking" part.

QeS 'utlh:
>
> To be honest I don't see these verbs as that much of a problem. Lots of
> languages have small and select groups of these kinds of "ambitransitive"
> verbs. English, for instance: burn, break, drown, choke, scatter, fly,
> boil, fry... Ubykh has them too, so they're not an English-only thing.
> They're a little frustrating, but they're absolutely typical of natural
> Terran languages and I'm not surprised to see a few such verbs appearing
> in Klingon. Whether Marc's doing them deliberately or not is, of course,
> another story, but I don't have a problem with them and I think there's
> no reason for us to start wondering about the looseness of argument
> structure of *all* Klingon verbs as a result.
>

Another one that I just thought of is {So'}.  I'm pretty sure I've seen it
used both transitively and intransitively, though I'm not sure if that was
in canon.  But I agree, I don't see a problem with a few words having this
property, and there's no reason to believe that it generalises to other
verbs.

De'vID:

> > I can't think of any examples where the semantic roles of subjects and
> > objects have changed.  We recently learned that {vergh} is transitive
> > (someone docks something), when some people have assumed it was
> > intransitive (the ship docks).
>
> QeS 'utlh:

> {meQ} "burn" is one, which we have attested with an object, with a non-
> agent subject, and as an adjectival.


Can you list the canon examples?  {meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv qoH neH} has it
with a subject, which canon sentences use it with an object or as an
adjectival?

-- 
De'vID
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