[Tlhingan-hol] roj

[Lieven]

Am 08.11.2015 um 01:00 schrieb De'vID:
> What is the difference between "make a joke" and "make a beverage"
> that makes it unlikely that the first verb takes an object while it is
> uncontroversial that the second one can?That's what I'm trying to
> determine.

Well, I'm not sure this is semantically correct (IANAL), so maybe this 
is just a theory. Anyway, since my daughter is being raised bi-lingual 
with German and dutch, I noticed that there are two kinds of "make". 
Actually, these fit to your question:

a) "make" can sometimes be replaced by do; this make is an action. For 
"make a joke" you can also say a verb "joking". "To joke" means to "tell 
a funny story", it's part of the definition.

b) "make" can mean "construct, produce, assemble". When you "make 
lunch", then you prepare food, the result is the lunch. You cannot say 
"we lunch".

This is indeed very confusing, since languages are not consistent with 
that. A german would do (make?) the mistake and say "I must make my 
homework", but in english it's "do your homework." In dutch and english 
you ask "what are you DOing?" - in German it's "was machst du" (what do 
you make).

So: what do you do? I'm telling a joke. {jIqID}
What do you make? I'm making some food. {Soj vIvut}

That's somehow what Alan wrote in another message.

That doesn't work always, but that's the reason why I see some words 
working with object and others not.

-------

At the end, we don't know for sure, and as long as one understands the 
intended meaning of a phrase I'll accept anything. We cannot omit each 
word which we do not understand properly.

-- 
Lieven L. Litaer
aka Quvar valer 'utlh
Grammarian of the KLI
http://www.facebook.com/Klingonteacher
http://www.klingonwiki.net