[87088] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: The topic marker -'e'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Tue Nov 24 21:42:04 2009
In-Reply-To: <47A96690-769A-405F-998E-691409B25CD5@alcaco.net>
From: Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:40:06 -0800
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
> Often the suffix {-lu'} maps well to English passive voice. However,
> sometimes it doesn't. For example, {tlhuHnISlu'} "one must breathe."
I didn't say that it was exactly the same; in fact, I was very careful
not to. -lu' probably does other things in Klingon, but it is also
doing something that is a passive.
> In a sentence with a verb bearing {-lu'}, the subject is indefinite.
Yes, because it is unimportant, and thus demoted, and thus gone.
> The object, if one exists, does not change.
No, it does not, in terms of neither its semantics nor its syntax,
which is why I said that it is not a perfect, canonical passive, where
we would expect vI- to change to jI-. What we have instead is vI-,
instead of meaning 1singular-3rd, meaning something-1singular.
Technically, this is an inverse voice construction (syntactically) but
semantically, it is functioning as a passive.
> I suspect that your
> understanding of the situation is being misinformed by your trying to
> apply terms from your linguistic training.
Dude, stop saying this. Just because you don't understand something
doesn't mean that anyone else who says anything about it is
automatically wrong. I am not misinformed, and I am not misapplying
terms.
