SuStel will certainly give an answer with more authority and more current knowledge of Okrand’s intentions. I merely have opinions and a knee-jerk reaction based on being self-diagnosed as “on the spectrum”, compelled to speak any truth as I believe it. This compulsion is evidence of my diversion from neuro-normal, especially since I’ve been burned by it so many times before, yet I still offer my opinion. On another spectrum, natural languages are at one end, and codes are at the other. Natural languages are methods of communication among members of its native speakers, and while there are rules of grammar and lists of vocabulary, sometimes there are idioms or figures of speech that don’t make it into the grammar books or dictionaries. In those instances, you have to ask a native speaker, because whatever they are doing with the language is okay. It’s their language. If you are an outsider, you might not really understand them, and you might feel compelled to tell them that they are wrong, but there’s a line between the people who grew up learning the language and those who enter it with a necessarily simplified understanding of the language (simplified, so that you can learn it in less time than it takes a child to grow up learning it) can never know the finer details of how a specific grammatical rule or use of specific vocabulary can venture. Primarily, a natural language is used for two native speakers to communicate with each other. Outsiders can communicate with them using their language, but speaking “like a native” is more rare than people who believe that they speak like a native would like to think. A code has rules that can't be stretched, and the vocabulary means what it means, and when a message goes through the encoding process and decoding process, it’s the original message. If Klingon were a code, your question would amount to: “If I encode this sentence this way, will someone else be able to decode it?" Artificial languages fall somewhere between these extremes. There are no native speakers. It is never used to communicate between two native speakers. It is always used to communicate between non-native speakers. If it is artificially created with sufficient skill (and I think Okrand has that skill), then it’s not a code because creating a language for a fictional population of native speakers with known cultural traits, the language develops in order to communicate within the culture of those people. The more alien the people, the more alien the language. So, one would expect Klingon to be better at expressing certain things than any language developed by and for any other culture, and worse at expressing things more alien to Klingon culture. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the language. It wasn’t created for people. It was created for Klingons. Meanwhile, here on Earth in the 21st century, non-native speakers of the language need to agree on how far the simplified understanding of the language that we have can be stretched. That’s where your question comes in. My personal understanding of this is that in all languages, as Okrand puts it, at the core, you have verbs and nouns, and leftovers (helper words). The core of sentence construction consists of giving verbs that tell you what is happening and nouns telling you the persons, places, or things that are involved in the action of the verb. The real business of language is to use word order and helper words to give you more specific information about what these nouns are doing in relation to the action of the verb. Before we knew about the prefix trick, we knew that the word order foundation of Klingon was Object Verb Subject. {loD chop targh} We also learned that the two nouns of this construction could be unstated, with their identity implied by the prefix on the verb. {chop} Then we spend years learning about dependent clauses, Sentence As Object, questions, and all the other-than-subject-or-object nouns. One of the more recently revealed grammatical constructions is the prefix trick. It mirrors the English transition from “I give the book to you,” to “ I give you the book.” The English version is interesting in that “I give you the book,” is ditransitive, using the word order to explain the relationship between the verb and each of the nouns, while in Klingon, it uses the prefix in order to explain this relationship. Part of that is an implied limit to what noun can be that first word (“you”) of the ditransitive, because it cannot be an explicit noun. It, by necessity, needs to be exclusively identified by the prefix, meaning that deixis alone identifies the benefactor. You cannot use this ditransitive construction to translate, “I gave Captain Krankor the book.” It simply doesn’t work, because there’s no Klingon way to put two nouns with no suffix in front of the verb without the assumption being a relationship between the two nouns instead of between each noun and the verb. Okrand could have created such a construction, so that, say, you could start with {HoD QanQor paq vInob} simply implies {HoDQanqorvaD} by position, but that’s not what he did. He only allows the construction if the benefactor can be identified by the prefix without an explicit noun. Likely, he realized the ambiguity resulting. You could have meant “I give Captain Krankor’s book." Here’s the problem: In English, the verb “give” is ditransitive. Apparently, this is also true in Klingon. In English, “kill” is not ditransitive. “I kill you the captain,” is not a valid sentence in English. Is *HoD qaHoH* a valid sentence in Klingon? According to the rules we’ve been told, yes, it should be valid, but it sticks in our craw because “I kill you the captain,” is wrong. Add that Okrand doesn’t like using the human grammar terms “direct object”, “indirect object”, “transitive”, “intransitive”, “ditransitive”. He just uses the word “object”, then smiles, cryptically. If he’s ever actually explained this in any comprehensible detail, I haven’t heard about it. So, the Klingon construction, which cannot be called “ditransitive”, but merely “the prefix trick”, behaves like the English ditransitive, which is a feature of specific verbs. “Give” has that feature. It can be used transitively or ditransitively (or vaguely intransitively), while “kill” cannot, in English, be ditransitive. So, does the prefix trick mimic the English ditransitivity and work only with specific verbs, or is it a broader grammatical feature of Klingon, which has no preference for which verbs can use it and which can’t? I know only one person who can answer this question. I personally wish it were the more broadly functional grammatical construction, since that would make it less of a mimic of English. It would make it harder for new students of the language to learn because it would feel… more alien to them. But since the prefix trick was probably invented in order to mimic English, I don’t attach myself to that decision. It’s a good enough question to be passed on to Okrand, giving him time to consider a decision we’ll live with for the remainder of the use of the langauge. pItlh charghwI’ ‘utlh (ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)
On Apr 8, 2026, at 1:30 AM, Lieven L. Litaer via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol@lists.kli.org> wrote:
Hello, dear friends of the Klingon language. I just learned a new word from an experienced inguist, called "ditransitivity". If I got it correct, this is used to describe verbs who can have 2 objects, as in "I give you (1) the knife (2)".
Question 1: The question came up if it's possible to assign this quality to Kingon verbs, and if it makes any sense to do so. I am aware that canon Klingon grammar does not use the term "transitivity", but it exists.
Using the "prefix trick", we have such verbs, as in {taj qanob} or {tIq Sa'ang}.
Question 2: Technically spoken, this is a replacement for the construction with {-vaD}:
SoHvaD taj vInob --> taj qanob.
I wonder how far this can be expanded. Following the pattern the following should be okay:
SoHvaD HoD vIHoH --> HoD qaHoH. SoHvaD paq vIlaD --> paq qalaD.
What do you think?
-- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" https://tlhInganHol.com https://klingon.wiki/En/Transitivity
_______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org