[839] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: "movie"mey, etc. (was: RE: RESENT: Bounced Mail III)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed May 12 23:47:50 1993
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Cc: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com
Date: Tue, 11 May 1993 16:35:46 PDT
In-Reply-To: "krankor@codex.prds.cdx.mot:com:Xerox's message of Fri, 7 May 1993
>>"You never need to apologize to me because of that action!"
>>("jIHvaD" because "apologize" is intransitive.)
>Wrong.
>"apologize" is intransitive. tlhIj is not. There is no such thing
>as transative/intransitive in Klingon. chotlhIjnIS is perfectly
>acceptible. This has been gone through before and I don't wish to
>rehash it again.
Krankor has asserted this theme (that there is no transitive/intransitive
distinction in Klingon) a number of times, and I thought that I had refuted it
rather well in a couple of messages. Besides myself, other linguists like Mark
Shoulson and Allan Wechsler have found it natural and perhaps necessary to
describe Klingon phenomena in terms of transitivity. Perhaps this question
should be put to Okrand through the new question-line.
In summary:
1. I maintain that transitive vs. intransitive is an important and fundamental
distinction in Klingon.
2. I am NOT arguing that it is always obvious from our present sketchy
description which verbs are transitive and which are intransitive. In the
"dictionary" itself, all we have is a bilingual wordlist with the crudest
possible part-of-speech designations. This is not enough to tell us, in many
cases, how each verb is correctly used. Such usage information, expressed in
terms of transitivity distinctions, or case frames, or "valency," will be
necessary in a more complete description. So when we learn that pub (V) means
"boil," we do not presently know if it is the intransitive (The water is
boiling) or the transitive (John boiled the water). However, if we cornered a
Klingon and asked, I'd bet it could be easily identified as one or the other.
3. I am NOT arguing that the Klingon distinction between transitive and
intransitive will mirror similar distinctions in English in all cases. Klingon
will have its own usage, and the rules will be discovered only by asking
informants. A classic example is yaS vImojpu' (officer I-it became), where,
unlike English, moj is transitive and takes "officer" as an object.
4. Klingon has 4 classic morphological features which, I believe, have
TRANSITIVE vs. INTRANSITIVE written all over them. These are a) the
distinction between "no object" verbal prefixes and the subject-object verb
prefixes, b) the productive causative suffix -moH, c) the impersonal-subject
suffix -lu', and d) reflexives.
Verbal prefixes: the "no object" prefixes jI-, bI-, ma-, Su-, and the
third-person zero prefixes are used when the verb has no "object" or when the
object is vague. The other prefixes agree or indicate both the subject (Okrand
seems to indicate that the subject is typically an "agent" in deep case or role
terms) and an "object." Given the caveats above about comparing English
transitivity with Klingon transitivity, I believe that Klingon transitive verbs
can appear with either kind of prefix; but Klingon intransitives can appear
only with the "no object" prefixes. To formalize this distinction in any
formal grammar, spell checker, grammar checker, morphological analyzer, etc.,
you have to mark Klingon verbs as being either transitive or intransitive. The
distinction is real in Klingon. If we had a better dictionary, transitivity
would be marked.
(What counts as an object, in Okrand's informal description is not completely
clear. From the available examples, I feel it more as a direct object or
"patient" kind of object, while Krankor has argued for loosening that
criterion, allowing that object to represent roles other than the patient when
the meaning is "obvious." Like most linguists, I am suspicious of what English
speakers find obvious, and I think that we need to ask Okrand rather than
speculate. )
The -moH causative suffix: Causative suffixes, in Klingon, Esperanto,
Mongolian, and a host of other languages, are a classic mechanism for turning
intransitive verbs (no-object) into transitive verbs (subject and object).
Just the presence of such a suffix in a language suggests that TRANSITIVE vs.
INTRANSITIVE is an extremely fundamental distinction. Some forms in -moH are
even listed (redundantly) in the wordlists.
taD v be frozen
taDmoH v freeze (cause to be frozen)
Sey v be excited
SeymoH v excite (cause to be excited)
puj v be weak
pujmoH v weaken (cause to be weak)
These basic verbs in Klingon are obviously intransitive; they should be used
only with the no-object prefixes. The -moH enhanced versions are transitivized
and can be used with either type of prefix. That is, you can freeze, excite or
weaken something or someone (the object). The best example of this in the
wordlist is probably
vem wake up, cease sleeping
vemmoH wake (someone) up
Here Okrand has recognized that merely glossing "vem" as "wake up" would very
likely confuse an English speaker. In English, we use "wake up" both
intransitively and transitively. With these glosses, however, Okrand is making
it clear that vem is intransitive (John woke up = John ceased sleeping), and
that to translate "wake up" (John woke up Mary) in the transitive sense we must
use the transitive "vemmoH."
In the more general case, -moH adds an "argument" to a predicate. Intransitive
verbs correspond to one-place predicates in predicate logic , e.g. sleep(John)
cease-sleeping(John). When you transitivize Qong (sleep) into QongmoH (cause to
sleep) or vem to vemmoH, you get two arguments : cause-to-sleep (John, Mary) =
John caused Mary to sleep, cause-to-cease-sleeping(John, Mary) = John woke up
Mary. When you add -moH to a verb is that already transitive, you get three
arguments. Starting with the fundamentally transitive verb Qoy (to hear),
Okrand's own example is HIQoymoH (command: you-me cause to hear [something])
or cause-to-hear(you, me, something).
The -lu' suffix. When -lu' is added, the sense of the word is somewhat
like the English passive, and the nominal subject of the verb in effect becomes
the patient. Daqawlu' = "you are remembered" or "someone remembers you." So,
in formal terms, -lu' can be added only to transitive or transitivized verbs.
Reflexives. Here again, a verb with a reflexive suffix is well formed
only if it is built on a transitive verb. (E.g. you cannot "sleep yourself"
*jIQong'egh = *I sleep myself (ill formed)
but you could conceivably kill yourself
jIHoH'egh = I kill myself (HoH is transitive)
or cause yourself to sleep
jIQong'eghmoH = I cause myself to sleep.
For any grammar or program to allow jIQong'eghmoH and jIHoH'egh while rejecting
*jIQong'egh, it has to know about transitivity.
****************
Given the presence of the -moH causative suffix, I would _suspect_ that pub
("boil") is in fact intransitive. So to say "The water boils" it would be
??pub bIQ = the water boils
For the transitive sense of "boil", -moH would _probably_ be used:
??bIQ vIpubmoH = I boil the water = I cause the water to boil.
This situation, at least, would be parallel to the vem/vemmoH example and would
be in harmony with the basic spirit of the language. If pub is in fact
transitive, then we would get
??bIQ vIpub = I boil the water
And we could wonder how "the water boils" would be translated.
In the end, all we can do is ask a Klingon. I would suggest asking Okrand if
pub is transitive or intransitive. I suspect he will say intransitive. He
might say transitive. But I doubt very much that he will entertain the notion
that there is no transitive/intransitive distinction in Klingon, as Cap'n
Krankor would have us believe.
Ken Beesley
