[87084] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: The topic marker -'e'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Tue Nov 24 21:20:01 2009
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:18:40 -0500
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
In-reply-to: <a1173fff0911241801t41b26553n3fe5ac32d8bc1c19@mail.gmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Christopher Doty wrote:
> 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.
Huh. See, that's interesting. Especially since {-lu'} sentences often
end up translated into English passive voice.
--
SuStel
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