On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 6:12 PM Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:

If we had a verb for “be alarmed”, you could say, {yI-[be alarmed]Qo’}, but the verb is {ghum} — “alarm, sound an alarm”. In a Statement, we could build “be alarmed” out of {glumlu’}, but when you put the {yI-} on it, the subject is expected to be the First Person.

Or you could say {yay'} "be shocked, dumbfounded" or {bIt} "be nervous, uneasy". The English "be alarmed" doesn't really have anything to do with alarms.

Agreed. ghum refers to becoming aware of something; alarmed has to do with an emotional state.

I would have no trouble reading bItqu' as be alarmed. Nervousness or uneasiness, taken to an extreme, could be a state of alarm.

{yI-} is *not* a First Person prefix, but I will assume you know it's Second Person subject and just misspoke.

 

Well, the statement “I am alarmed,” would be {vIghumlu’} or “-indefinite subject- alarms me."

Does the imperative prefix do the same {-lu’} trick pointing to the object instead of the subject? Is {yIghumlu’} valid for “Be alarmed!”?

I'm going to have to go with an unequivocal "No".  The indefinite subject suffix doesn't "point" the meaning of a word to anything that the word doesn't normally point to. It *always* means the subject is indefinite. That is completely incompatible with imperatives, which *always* have a second-person subject.

Agreed. Imperative impersonal subject makes no semantic sense in Klingon.

I might translate this as yIbItqu'Qo' or yIbItHa'qu''eghmoH.

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SuStel
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