[Tlhingan-hol] HuS

[De'vID]

SuStel:
>> I think we'll eventually find that, like so many other
>> could-be-subject-could-be-object verbs, it can go either way at the need
>> of the speaker, and context makes the meaning clear.

QeS 'utlh:
> Oh, I tend to think so too, leaving it to the verb's argument structure to
> disambiguate. All I meant is just that this is one of those examples where
> we have no canon support for prioritising one interpretation over the other.

Does anyone have statistics on the could-be-subject-could-be-object
verbs? I think there aren't that many of them (a few dozen at most?),
though I haven't made any effort to actually go through the word list
and count them.

A bunch of people asked Okrand about verb transitivity at qepHom 2011.
We got that the subjects of {ghur} and {nup} are doing the increasing
and decreasing, respectively, and that one has to add {-moH} to
increase or decrease something else. He started to say that {DIng}
worked like {jIr}, but (according to my notes of the event) got
interrupted before he could finish his explanation. But we know that
one {jIrmoH}s a bat'leth, and that's sufficient to establish that the
subject of {DIng} spins.

We know that the subject of {vIH} moves by its definition: "move, be
in motion". (Wouldn't it have been nice if {HuS} had been "hang, be
hanging"?)

We know {meQ} and {So'} can be both because we have canon examples of both.

subject: {vIH}, {ghur}, {nup}, {jIr}, {DIng}
both: {meQ}, {So'}
object:
unknown: {HuS}

Any others? Someone must have a list. I'm drawing a blank on such
verbs where (only) the object does the action that the verb describes.

p.s. Another pair I thought of was {He'} and {largh}, "smell, emit
odor" and "smell, sense odors", respectively, although I think that's
not the kind of verb we're talking about, since "to smell something"
doesn't mean "to cause something to smell" (the way that "to spin
something" means to "cause something to spin"). It's fortunate though
that we didn't get just a single entry with the definition "v. smell".

-- 
De'vID