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.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name