[tlhIngan Hol] "Prefix trick" with third-person verb prefixes

[SuStel]

On 10/1/2024 12:51 PM, Will Martin via tlhIngan-Hol wrote:
> Different verbs use different prepositions (including what we might 
> call the “null” preposition, if we were to use Klingon grammatical 
> terms) to link them to their direct and indirect objects. It’s the 
> “The Moon orbits the Earth,” vs. “The Moon orbits around the Earth,” 
> and “The Moon goes around the Earth,” but it can’t be “The Moon Goes 
> the Earth,” thing.

No, prepositions do not link verbs with their direct or indirect 
objects. The object of a preposition is not an argument to the verb; it 
is an argument to the preposition. In /The moon goes around the earth,/ 
/the earth/ is not an argument of /goes./ It's not a direct or indirect 
object. /The earth/ is the object of /around./


> The validity of your argument doesn’t invalidate mine. We both know 
> that both versions of the sentences in question, in English and in 
> Klingon have identical meaning. The grammarians who analyze these 
> sentences have invented grammatical rules to explain what the words 
> are doing, and that analysis could have easily been arbitrarily 
> different. Actual languages don’t follow rules. They merely imply them.

Grammarians have invented different grammatical rules for how these 
sentences work because these sentences work in different ways. 
Grammatical rules are not arbitrary: they attempt to describe the 
languages they're about. If a language works a certain way, its grammar 
will look a certain way.

Semantic and syntax really are two different things, no matter how much 
you want to ignore that difference.


>>> {SoHvaD chab vInob. chab qanob.}
>>>
>>> The prefix {qa-} suggests that “you" is the direct object (when 
>>> “you” is actually the indirect object), similar to the examples in 
>>> English.
>>
>> The word that comes before the verb is the "object," not the "direct 
>> object." Sometimes you can distinguish the English role of direct or 
>> indirect object for the Klingon "object," but to Klingon, it's just 
>> an "object."
>>
> You like to bring this up, except when you like to use the term 
> “direct object”, yourself.

Which I explained. You can use the terms "direct object" and "indirect 
object" as they apply in English to describe the /semantics/ of what's 
happening in Klingon. But /syntactically,/ you can't. Syntactically, 
Klingon has objects and beneficiaries, not direct objects and indirect 
objects.

For example: you'll twist yourself in knots trying to explain how the 
canonical sentences *SengmeywIj vIja'laHbe'* /I cannot speak of my 
tragedies/ and *loDnI'Daj vavDaj je ja' qeylIS*/Kahless tells his father 
and brother/ can coexist in a single canonical document. If you just 
think in terms of "direct objects," what's the proper direct object of 
*ja'*? Is it the person being told something or the something that's 
being told? Why does it keep changing?

You don't have to worry about that when you realize that "direct object" 
is not a syntactic role in Klingon. There are just "objects." In 
*SengmeywIj vIja'laHbe',* we have a sentence where the object happens to 
be what in English we would consider to be the direct object. In 
*loDnI'Daj vavDaj je ja' qeylIS,* we have a sentence where the object 
happens to be what English would consider to be the indirect object. 
It's no big deal if you stop sticking the words "direct" and "indirect" 
into the sentence where they weren't asked for. Unless you're actually 
describing the difference between a thing acted upon and a thing for 
which an action is performed, you don't need those terms.

This is why I sometimes turn to the words /patient, theme, recipient,/ 
and /beneficiary:/ to make it plain that I'm talking about a semantic 
role, not a syntactic one, because people get confused by how direct and 
indirect objects can be a syntactic role in one language and a semantic 
one in another.


> Full disclosure, I was using 1st & 2nd person for the same reason. It 
> is SO much more common for the prefix trick to be used when 1st or 2nd 
> person is the subject and the indirect object, but the direct object 
> is 3rd person, that in terms of learning how to use the prefix trick 
> and recognize it, acting as if that were the whole thing would leave 
> you excellently capable of using and recognizing the prefix trick more 
> than 90% of the time, and after you’ve successfully gotten that under 
> your belt, you’d be ready to take on {‘epIl naH Dunob} and just see 
> that it works.

Sure, but Luis's question was specifically going beyond a beginner's 
understanding of the prefix trick and into exactly these waters.


> I’ve never encountered plurality alone marking the indirect object 
> among 3rd person direct and indirect object. I hadn’t considered it. 
> If you say Okrand says it’s fine, then obviously it’s fine. There he 
> goes, changing the bridge. I don’t have a problem with that. It’s his 
> bridge. Thanks for the update. Klingon grammar just got a little 
> harder. {wejpuH.}

Okrand didn't say that particular thing was fine. He said that you can 
use the prefix trick in the third person when it makes sense and when 
the meaning is clear. There's no clear-cut rule telling us when it's 
okay. It depends on the verb, it depends on the context, it depends on 
the audience.

If you come across *tlhIngan Hol lujatlh chaH* and you have doubts as to 
whether it means /They speak Klingon/ or /They say "Klingon language" to 
him,/ then it's not an appropriate use of the prefix trick because the 
meaning is not clear. Since *Hol* and *jatlh* are so commonly associated 
with *Hol jatlh* /speak a language,/ I would not expect this sentence to 
be a good use of the prefix trick if the meaning was supposed to be 
/They say "Klingon language" to him./


>>> The prefix says “I [verb] you” or “You [verb] me”, but there’s an 
>>> extra unmarked noun before the verb jumping up and down, yelling, 
>>> “I’m the real direct object!”
>>
>> Explicit nouns are the actual objects; prefixes merely /agree/ with 
>> objects. Assuming it's not an error, if the prefix doesn't agree with 
>> the object that's sitting right there, then it is agreeing with an 
>> unstated indirect object.
>>
> Given how heavily you’d be relying on context to identify the indirect 
> object in such a case, compared to how easy it is to identify the 1st 
> or 2nd person indirect object, I think I can do just fine never using 
> this new grammar example. I’d probably just point to the indirect 
> object and say the sentence without the prefix trick, or use {-‘e’} or 
> {-vaD} on the indirect object.

*shrug*


> It’s also such a limited extension of what we’ve known for so long, 
> given the limited differentiation of explicit 3rd person plurality in 
> the prefix set. Most of the time you’d like to use it, you can’t 
> because the direct object and indirect object would have the same 
> plurality and person, or would have a pairing for which there is no 
> different prefix. You’d be especially clever to use this well every 
> rare now and then, but is it really useful while actually speaking 
> Klingon?

The rule is you can do it when it makes sense and when the meaning is 
clear. Therefore, you don't have to be particularly clever at saying it 
or understanding it. As it's been described to us, if it's not easy, 
it's not appropriate.


> That’s what inspires the {wejpuH} response. Here, among Klingon 
> speakers you are more likely to have puzzled looks because they think 
> you used the prefix wrong, or they’ll just ignore what they thought 
> was your mistake. It would be quite rare that someone would interpret 
> this use of the prefix trick correctly.

Then it's not an appropriate use of the prefix trick. As Okrand said.


>>> {loDnI’Daj vavDaj je ja’ qeylIS} is not an example of the prefix 
>>> trick. It’s just a common Klingon grammatical error.
>>
>> It is not an error. It is evidence that Klingon verbs take "objects" 
>> as arguments, not "direct objects." You have never let go of this 
>> desperate idea that Klingon verb arguments are strictly split between 
>> direct and indirect objects. They're not. Direct and indirect object 
>> are not syntactic roles in Klingon; they are syntactic roles in 
>> English that are sometimes used to describe things that are happening 
>> semantically in Klingon. The relevant Klingon syntactic roles in this 
>> topic are "object" and "beneficiary.”
>>
> If you say so, it must be true. Thanks for the clarification.

It's true because it's in /paq'batlh/ and survived into the second 
edition without change. Not because I say so.


> For me, “direct object” and “indirect object” are merely useful terms 
> to explain different kinds of objects, similar to the way Klingon 
> separates some objects out explicitly as beneficiary, topic/focus, 
> locative, etc.

Klingon calls beneficiary, topic, focus, and locative "syntactic" roles, 
because in Klingon they are. They are syntactic markers in Klingon: you 
mark nouns with suffixes to indicate these roles. Klingon has other 
syntactic roles called "object" and "subject." These are indicated by 
their positions before and after a verb in a verbal clause, not by a suffix.

With syntax, you can know the roles of each word without knowing what 
the word means. If I say *XvaD YDaq O V S'e',* we have a wealth of 
syntactic knowledge without any semantic information. We know that S, 
and only S, does *V* on or intended for O (we don't know for sure 
which), at or around Y, for the benefit of X. We have no idea what's 
going on, but we do know the relationships of all the words to each 
other. That's syntax.

In that example, we don't know for sure whether A is a direct object or 
an indirect object. In Klingon, the distinction doesn't really matter. 
*O V S* simply means that S does something on or intended for O. 
Examples with meaning are *tlhIngan Hol vIjatlh jIH* (I act upon the 
Klingon language by speaking it), where O is a direct object; and 
*vavDaj ja' ghaH* (his act is intended for his father, which he performs 
by telling), where O is an indirect object.

O is just an "object." Klingon doesn't syntactically distinguish between 
direct and indirect object this way. It distinguishes between object and 
beneficiary, and one /semantic/ role of the beneficiary is that of 
indirect object: the entity who "receives" the action.


> Yes, I understand that “direct object” is not specially different from 
> the other kinds of objects. The only thing that marks it as different 
> is… the lack of any marker. No Type 5 suffix. It is “marked” by word 
> order alone, and that can be confusing because of the collision of 
> clauses in a complex sentence, or because of noun-noun constructions, 
> and I’m sure there are other settings in which it is obscure.

And the point is that a noun in the O position without any suffix is not 
/always/ a direct object. Sometimes it is an indirect object. It is 
especially common for prefix agreeing without any explicit noun to 
indicate an indirect object, as in *qaja'pu'*/I told you./ The 
difference is /semantic,/ so making /syntactic/ rules about direct and 
indirect objects to try to explain the prefix trick won't work. (The 
same goes for *-moH* sentences.)


> I genuinely thank you for opening my understanding of Okrand’s newer 
> thoughts on the prefix trick.

See them here: 
http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/2022-June/063018.html


> pab ghantoHmey chu’ lughojmoH SuStel ‘oqranD je.
Given the context of the above conversation and your misapprehension 
that it has to do with mismatching plurals, the very fact that this 
ordinarily wouldn't work makes it work. Since your audience /knows/ what 
you're doing when you do this, it's an appropriate use. If you just 
walked up to someone and said it without context, it wouldn't be 
appropriate, because it would be confusing. Your sarcastic sendoff 
demonstrates the entire point.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name
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