[Tlhingan-hol] Interactions between verb suffixes

[SuStel]

On 12/21/2015 3:49 PM, Will Martin wrote:
> I hate it because it is so radically different from anything Okrand has
> explained in TKD or any other setting revealed to us. He gives us no
> reason to interpret {QeD vIghojmoH} as anything except for “I cause
> science to learn.” Yet, he expects us to understand this to mean “I
> cause some unidentified entity to learn science.”

It's not explained in TKD, but it DOES obey the rules one can discern 
from examples of apparently good Klingon. TKD admits that its 
description of Klingon grammar is incomplete; this is just one of those 
bits that aren't fully explained.

I think being down about {-moH} not following its TKD explanation misses 
the important fact that TKD never really DOES explain how {-moH} works. 
It just says that the subject causes a condition to change or come into 
existence, but never explains anything about how the roles of subject, 
direct object, or indirect object actually work with it. The examples in 
TKD seem clear, and in the early days we extrapolated the rules from 
them, but we always knew there were questions about "ditransitivity" and 
indirect objects and indefinite subjects. As we started to get more 
examples, we came to realize that the old rules extrapolated from the 
examples of TKD didn't tell the whole story. I *think* we've nailed down 
how it really works now, but new evidence could always undermine that.

New evidence even undermines rules in the black and white of TKD itself.

> Meanwhile, if we say {Sor vImeQmoH}, that is NEVER supposed to be
> interpreted as “I cause some undetermined entity to burn tree.”

Untrue. It's simply that one would overwhelmingly EXPECT it to mean "I 
burn a tree," because one of the things trees are known for is being 
flammable. There's no expectation in the mind of the listener that there 
has to be another entity involved.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, 
I don't know.

It's funny BECAUSE you overwhelmingly expect one meaning but get the 
other. I could imagine meQmoH (or tuQmoH!) doing exactly the same thing.

> And new people are supposed to figure that out without any explanation.

No, they're not. This is an advanced topic. I would never blame a 
beginner for being confused by it. There's lots of grammar we now know 
that isn't in TKD, and it only revealed in out-of-print issues of HolQeD 
or long-offline MSN messages. We have to rely on each other to learn 
these things, and getting the KLI's wiki updated would be good too.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name