discovering that the flip side of his love for the beauty of Klingon grammar is that he absolutely despises Okrand’s decisions about how to handle ditransitive verbs with {-moH}.
I've come to a much fuller understanding of how and why this works the way it does. I can actually think in these terms now. Please allow me to illustrate it for you. You may find it useful in reconciling yourself to the way things are.
First of all, think of Klingon grammar as a lot less rigid than we used to in the old days. We used to think that when adding -moH, the subject becomes the object, period. The reality is more nuanced than that.
Klingon syntax has subjects and objects. But note that when we say object, we're not necessarily saying direct or indirect object. TKD doesn't make the distinction until the Addendum, wherein it first introduces the idea that -vaD can mark indirect objects.
In Klingon, an object can be either direct or indirect, and
sometimes the difference is purely contextual. For instance, we
have seen that we can say puq ghojmoH HoD The captain
teaches the child; the captain causes the child to learn,
but we can also say 'otlhQeD ghojmoH HoD The captain
teaches physics; the captain causes (someone) to learn physics.
In the first case, the puq is not having something done to
him or her; he or she is doing something. Therefore, the puq
is not a direct object. It must be an indirect object. In the
second case, 'otlhQeD is having something done to it (it
is being learned), so it is a direct object. Notice that being
caused to do something does not count as having something done to
you; what's important is whether the root verb is an action being
done to you.
When you want to talk about both the thing being acted upon ('otlhQeD,
the direct object) and the thing who benefits from or receives the
action (puq, the indirect object), the direct object takes
the object position and the indirect object gets marked with -vaD
and goes in the front. puqvaD 'otlhQeD ghojmoH HoD.
Basically, the direct object trumps the indirect object and pushes
it away from the verb. The captain causes something to happen;
learning happens, physics is learned, the child is the target of
all this.
This flexibility of objects is why you can simultaneously have qaja'pu'
I told you and lut vIja'pu' I told the story.
In the first case there's no direct object to get in the way of
the indirect object being the syntactic object of the verb. In the
second the verb has an explicit direct object. If you wanted to
say whom you told the story to, you would say puqvaD lut
vIja'. This isn't even a -moH issue. Both direct and
indirect objects can go in the object position, but if you have
both the direct object wins and the indirect object goes to -vaD.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name