[87079] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: The topic marker -'e'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Tue Nov 24 21:03:50 2009
In-Reply-To: <4B0C8DCD.30800@trimboli.name>
From: Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:01:56 -0800
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 17:52, David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name> wrote:
> Klingon doesn't have a passive voice, ...
I'll probably get in trouble for this, too, but I would say that
Klingon does have a passive voice, functionally-speaking.
Functionally, we think of passives as demoting an agent (so that it
leaves the phrase entirely) and promoting a patient to subject. With
-lu' in Klingon, we see just such a thing: the one doing the action
goes away, and the patient is now the subject. Now, it's not
completely a passive, since we're still using a transitive verb prefix
(if it were a try passive, we'd expect, e.g., vI- to become jI- with
addition of -lu', instead of staying vI-), but it's certainly doing
much of the work of a passive voice.
