[Tlhingan-hol] Objects, direct and indirect

[André Müller]

Thanks, SuStel. I didn't remember this quote. It really sounds like it's
only possible for 1st and 2nd person. The wording doesn't completely
exclude the possibility of doing the same with a 3rd person object, perhaps
because the example given had a 3rd person object (e.g. a simple noun) as
the direct object and thus the prefix trick would be "invisible" with a 3rd
person indirect object, but I agree that this makes my analysis about the
prefix trick a tad less plausible. It still feels right to me to say
{qabmey lunob.} for 'They gave him the books.' (but I wouldn't use it
myself).

Sometimes I wonder how to interprete Okrand's analyses: On the one hand,
he's the creator of the language and has all the power. If he says,
something is not possible in Klingon, that's what it is. On the other hand,
inside the "game", he is in a way a linguist who analyses the language in
just the same way a Terran linguist would do with a minority language from
the Caucasus, Northern America, or Southeast Asia. A reference grammar
*can* include over-generalisations and missinterpretations by the linguist
author. Sometimes there are cleverer analyses that explain things
differently.
That's a bit of a philosophical question. Maybe we shouldn't discuss it in
this thread.

- André

2015-11-23 21:26 GMT+01:00 SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name>:

> On 11/23/2015 3:14 PM, André Müller wrote:
>
>>
>> Well, do we know that it doesn't work with third persons? Why shouldn't
>> it? It seems a bit arbitrary (though not impossible) to assume that the
>> prefix trick only works for the first and second person. I don't have
>> TKD or KGT here at my office, so I'm not sure what Okrand explicitly
>> said. And I have no possibility to search through all sentences where
>> the prefix trick is applied.
>>
>
> Okrand wrote in an MSN post:
>
>    When the indirect object (in this case, the hearer) is first or
>    second person, the pronominal prefix which normally indicates first
>    or second person object may be used.
>
>    [...]
>
>    if the verb is used with a pronominal prefix indicating a first- or
>    second-person object, that first or second person is the indirect
>    object.
>
> --
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tlhingan-hol mailing list
> Tlhingan-hol at kli.org
> http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20151124/47567571/attachment.html>