[87665] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Today is a good day to discuss grammar
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (=?UTF-8?B?QW5kcsOpIE3DvGxsZXI=?=)
Fri Jan 15 18:21:55 2010
In-Reply-To: <20100115235604.21326ti0e39wx6cc@letter.sics.se>
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:20:08 +0100
From: =?UTF-8?B?QW5kcsOpIE3DvGxsZXI=?= <esperantist@gmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Hi,
You can translate the original sentence more closely as "Today is good in
order that someone dies." (not sure if this is grammatical in English, I'm
not a native speaker).
Your pab-sentence further down is ungrammatical though, as {ja'chuq}, as you
say yourself, is intransitive, so it cannot have {pab} as a direct object.
{ja'chuqlu'meH QaQ jajvam} should be correct, though. I would use a similar
translation in English, the same you use in the e-mail topic (without
"grammar", then).
And sometimes it might be best to translate such phrases as "Someone
sleeps." {Qonglu'}
In German, it's possible to form a passive of intransitive verbs as well,
like "Es wird geschlafen." (it is being slept?), which simply means "People
are sleeping" or "Someone is sleeping.", or maybe "There is sleeping going
on.", the implied meaning here might be similar to the Klingon intransitive
verb with {-lu'} suffix.
Greetings,
- André
2010/1/15 <kff@sics.se>
> Hi!
>
> Recently, I was thinking about {Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam}. The English
> translation uses infinitive (is it called that in English?) "to die"
> wheras the Klingon has the indefinite subject marker {-lu'} instead.
> Is that a standard way to translate the indefinite subject for
> intransitive verbs?
>
> All of the example verbs in TKD 4.2.5 are transitive which means that
> the suggested translation (passive form) is less than useful since the
> passive form has the object of the indefinite subject verb as subject,
> but for an intransitive verb there is no such object.
>
> So what's the word on intransitive verbs with indefinite subject?
>
> {pab ja'chuqlu'meH QaQ jajvam}
>
> /buSwI'
>
>
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