On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 1:02 PM SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
On 4/10/2019 12:48 PM, Ed Bailey wrote:
It seems this behavior is seen in Klingon verbs like meQ, where -moH is sometimes dropped. Perhaps this happens due to your out-of-universe explanation, but an in-universe explanation would be the desire for brevity, combined with pragmatics.Wait, who determined that -moH is sometimes dropped from meQ, and how did they determine it? I recognize that meQ is first defined and used for us as burn and is used several times with the subject being the thing that is on fire, and that KGT used it transitively with the thing on fire as the object, but how do you go from that to saying the mechanism behind this is a dropped -moH? How do you know it isn't just that the subject and object of the verb are flexible in the same way that English burn is? (Which is probably the reason why the usage changed.) Or some other explanation I haven't thought of?
meQ used transitively is synonymous with meQmoH, right? So you can say meQmoH if you like, or you can dispense with -moH. But yes, there's no telling whether the transitive or intransitive sense came first.
The fact that you can (apparently) say meQ or meQmoH to mean the same thing doesn't mean that one necessarily arises from a dropping or adding of -moH for brevity or pragmatics. That's one possible reason, but there are others.
And we don't actually know that you can say meQmoH and mean burn (something). Maybe the existence of transitive meQ means Klingons don't accept the use of meQmoH at all, because that would be silly. I'm not saying this is the case, just that we don't know.
You can use the word whichever way you want, and I can't say
anything against it. But you can't claim that the meQ/meQmoH
difference is specifically because of a dropped -moH, let
alone that the -moH is dropped for the sake of brevity.
If meQ is just flexible like English burn, wouldn't you like to know what other Klingon verbs are flexible in this way?
Not really. I'd like to know the correct subjects and objects to use for verbs. If some of them are flexible, sure, I'd like to know that. But I'm not particularly hoping for them, and I'm certainly not proposing a mechanism by which other verbs might also arise the same way.
But I don't look forward to finding Englishisms in Klingon.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name