[Tlhingan-hol] Loose Klingon

[Felix Malmenbeck]

Whoops; Ha’DIbaHmey meQ Sop ‘e’ tIv tera’nganpu’ is from CK, not TKW.

Dop yImeQ QobDI' ghu'.
________________________________________
From: Felix Malmenbeck [felixm at kth.se]
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 10:54
To: De'vID jonpIn; tlhIngan-Hol at KLI.org
Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Loose Klingon

Mixed use of So' is canon: nuqDaq So'taH yaS ("Where is the officer hiding@ [TKD]), Duj So' ("He/She hides the ship" [KGT])

Transitive use of meQ:
to'waQ meQ vutwI' [KGT]

Adjectival:
Ha’DIbaHmey meQ Sop ‘e’ tIv tera’nganpu’ [TKW]

________________________________________
From: De'vID jonpIn [de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 10:33
To: KLI
Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Loose Klingon

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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