[Tlhingan-hol] {-meH}ed nouns

[SuStel]

On 1/28/2016 11:46 AM, lojmIttI'wI'nuv wrote:
> Thank you for your thorough production of appropriate canon. I concede
> on all points made.
>
> It does seem that you argue that TKD section 6.8 in the Appendix has
> been rendered all but invalid and should be mostly ignored, except to
> suggest that if a direct and indirect object need to be differentiated
> and the prefix trick is not applicable or preferred, {-vaD} should be
> used to mark the indirect object. If that’s what he meant, he didn’t
> present it very well, hence my misunderstanding.

TKD 6.8 is still perfectly valid. It says that the noun marked 
syntactically as the beneficiary can play the role of indirect object. 
Not all uses of {-vaD} are examples of indirect objects (e.g., {Qu'vaD 
lI' De'vam}).

Unless a verb has been shown to be flexible in whether its object can 
refer to a direct or indirect object, always assume it's only direct, 
and use the beneficiary to refer to an indirect object.

    yaSvaD taj nobpu' qama'
    the prisoner gave the officer the knife

is canonical and valid.

    *yaS nobpu' qama'
    the prisoner gave the officer (something unspecified)

is probably not valid, though we can't PROVE that with negative 
evidence. The only thing this can mean is "the prisoner gave the officer 
(to someone or something)."

> Since I didn’t have a pre-Appendix version of TKD, I took it as a whole,
> and when I read the section on Indirect Objects, I figured inaccurately
> that previous mentions of Objects likely implied Direct Objects, much as
> the invention of digital watches rendered all earlier reference to
> watches to mean analog watches.

The phrase "silent movies" didn't spring up until the phrase "talking 
movies" did. Until then they were just "movies." It's a retroactive name.

TKD is sloppy with its terminology, no doubt. The phrase "direct object" 
does not occur in TKD, and section 6.8 says "the object of the verb is 
the recipient of the action," which is canonically not always true. Even 
here, the word "recipient" is strange—in {yaSvaD taj nobpu' qama'} I'd 
consider the officer the "recipient," not the knife. I understand what 
Okrand means, but he's not using very precise words to describe it.

> I’m not sure I ever saw the MSN canon. I never subscribed. Was it shared
> in HolQeD?

I dunno. I'll repost it following this message.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name