jevreH:

qIHchuq puqpu’ma’ ‘e’ wIta’nIS Ca'Non master: qIHchuqmeH puqpu’ma’ mavangnIS

I like these choices too, since they are "cleaner" than the ones I proposed. However I still wonder, whether {puqpu'ma' DIqIHchuqnISmoH} and {puqlI'vaD puqwI' DaqIHnISmoH} are equally correct, whether my translation of {puqpu'ma' DIqIHnISmoH} is correct.. ..and qeylIS knows I wonder, what the ghe''or is, this "normal usage" HQ talks about. ~ m. qunen'oS keep calm and study Ca'Non

On 4/16/2019 12:59 PM, Will Martin wrote:

We don’t seem to have a problem with the idea that {jI-} means the same entity is the subject of causation AND the subject of being hot, even though there is no explicit explanation of how this works

You want to understand? Never say the phrase "subject of the causation" again. You say it every time, and it's what gets you off track every time. How it works is simple. The subject performs whatever the entire verb is. If there is a *-moH* on the verb, then the subject causes something to happen. Whether the subject performs the action described by the bare verb or any of its other suffixes is a matter of interpretation and context. Someone else might perform the action that is caused by the subject. There is no formula to determine who that is; you need to figure it out from context and the hints given to you by the verb and its suffixes. *jItuj'eghmoH* I am the subject. I cause something to happen. The action that happens, whoever does it, is /being hot./ The *-'egh* tells me that, since there is no other entity in this sentence, I must be doing something to myself. Either I am /being hot myself,/ which makes no sense, or I am /causing myself/ to do something, which does make sense. Also since there is no other entity in this sentence, I must be causing myself to be hot. There is no other interpretation. *puqpu’ma’ DIqIHchuqnISmoH* We are the subject. We cause something. Our children are the object; something is being done to them. The action being described is meeting for the first time. Someone is doing something to each other. Someone needs something. There are multiple ways this can be interpreted. The children might need something, or we might need something. The children might be doing something to each other, or we might be doing something to each other. /We cause each other to need to meet our children. We need to cause each other to meet our children. We cause our children to need to meet each other. We need to cause our children to meet each other. / Maybe I haven't thought of all combinations, but you get the point. Klingon doesn't have a set formula for this stuff, but you keep looking for one. You simply need to remember that *-moH* only means that the subject causes something. It doesn't automatically separate the subject from performing the action too, and it doesn't automatically assign specific roles to direct or indirect objects. There are customary ways of saying things, but that's all part of supplying hints to interpretation. The best course of action is to avoid ambiguous sentences like this if you want to be clear. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name

On 4/16/2019 1:55 PM, Alan Anderson wrote:

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 1:19 PM SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name <mailto:sustel@trimboli.name>> wrote:

On 4/16/2019 12:59 PM, Will Martin wrote:

...

We don’t seem to have a problem with the idea that {jI-} means the same entity is the subject of causation AND the subject of being hot, even though there is no explicit explanation of how this works

You want to understand?

Never say the phrase "subject of the causation" again.

You say it every time, and it's what gets you off track every time.

How it works is simple. The subject performs whatever the entire verb is. If there is a *-moH* on the verb, then the subject causes something to happen.

I don't grasp the distinction you are making between the ideas in "subject of the causation" and "subject [that] causes something to happen". You seem to think it's perfectly clear, but you've never been able to explain why the first phrase is bad and the second one is good.

Whether the subject performs the action described by the bare verb or any of its other suffixes is a matter of interpretation and context. Someone else might perform the action that is caused by the subject.

The someone else you mention would thus be the subject of the action, as opposed to being the subject of the causation, right?

Here we go again. /Subject/ is a term of syntax, applied without any consideration to meaning. /Causer, agent, theme,/ and /experiencer/ are terms of semantics. In a sentence without *-moH,* the situation is very simple. The subject is always the agent/theme/experiencer. Easy. In a sentence with *-moH,* the situation requires analysis and attention to context. The subject is always the causer, but may or may not be the agent, theme, or experiencer. Any objects, whether direct or indirect, may or may not be the agent, theme, or experiencer. To split a Klingon sentence with *-moH* up into "subject of the causation" and "subject of the action" is to incorrectly apply linguistic terminology to a distinction that may not even exist in a given sentence. In a simple *-moH* sentence like *puq vIQuchmoH,* sure, you could imagine this as *Quch puq* and *vI/-cause./* Subject of action, subject of cause. Hooray. This breaks down when you get to sentences like *puqvaD tlhIngan Hol vIghojmoH* and *puq vIghojmoH, *not to mention *Qo'noS tuqmey muvchuqmoH qeylIS**.* These sentences defy such simple attempts to make Klingon syntax into a formula. The "subject of the action" seems to change arbitrarily, hence charghwI''s despair. And so I'm telling him to jettison his misleading and only-useful-when-it's-easy terminology and see the semantics behind what's really going on.

There is no formula to determine who that is; you need to figure it out from context and the hints given to you by the verb and its suffixes...

Your lengthy analysis sounds to me like a wordier version of "...there is no explicit explanation of how this works."

There ARE explanations, though Okrand has not necessarily laid them all out. I've explained them a lot, to the extent that I can. There is no simple formula, which is what he wants. He wants verb A --> A verb B, and so A verb B --> A5 B verbmoH C, or something like that, that he has worked out in his head. He wants a purely syntactic formula to follow. Klingon doesn't work like that. But there ARE patterns. We know that when A causes B to act on C, *B**vaD C VmoH A.* When A causes no one in particular to act on C, *C VmoH A.* When A causes B to act on nothing in particular, *B VmoH A.* These are simple enough to follow, and he can repeat them, but charghwI' doesn't really understand WHY they are the way they are. Continuing to say things like "the subject of the causation" just demonstrates this lack of understanding. We also have indications that the rule of type 1 verb suffixes requiring no-object prefixes only applies when the prefix isn't agreeing with something other than the reflexive parties. And this makes sense if we consider that the suffixes, fixed in place as they are, are incapable of telling us which entities they belong to in a sentence with *-moH.* "No explicit explanation of how this works" is true only in the sense that Okrand hasn't announced how all this stuff works. But as linguistic descriptivists — right? — we look at what he's written and deduce the rules. We have quite a lot of data on this. We can craft explanations. There are admittedly imperfect, and can be refined or overruled with the discovery of, or new understanding of, new data, but they are nevertheless explanations. When TKD came out, we all managed to figure out the rule that when you take a sentence like *Quch puq,* and you add *-moH* to say that I caused this to happen, you make *puq* the object. /THERE IS NO EXPLANATION OF THIS ANYWHERE IN TKD. /We simply deduced the rules. So we can flail about helplessly with no syntactic formula for *-moH* given to us by Okrand, or we can deduce the rules and why they are what they are. Which is what we've been doing all along. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name

On 4/16/2019 4:07 PM, Will Martin wrote:

To give my wording to an explanation that SuStel gave earlier, trying to show evidence that to some extent, “I get it,” the suffix {-moH} changes the interpretation of what the prefix means.

No. Except when dealing with *-lu',* the prefix always means exactly what it says. *DI-,* for example, means first-person plural subject and third-person plural object. What the prefix does NOT do is tell you what the semantic roles of the subject and object are.

This is not unique. The suffixes {-lu’}, {-‘egh}, and {-chuq} change how we interpret the prefix,

*-lu'* does; *-'egh* and *-chuq* do not. According to TKD, *-'egh* and *-chuq* require no-object prefixes, because there are no objects when you've got a reflexive subject. Evidence tells us that when *-moH* is involved, the no-object-prefix rule is no longer in play. The prefix still won't agree with the reflexive entity, but it might agree with any other subjects or objects in the sentence.

and Okrand went out of his way to explain the details of how those suffixes work and their effect on the prefix’s meaning. To understand {-moH}, we basically have to combine the verb with {-moH} BEFORE we interpret the prefix (or ANY other affix, for that matter).

No. The prefix simply agrees with the subject and some object, as it always does. You simply have to figure out which object it's agreeing with and what that object's semantic role in the sentence is. *tlhIngan Hol qaghojmoH* /I teach you Klingon./ The prefix *qa-* /I—you (singular)/ refers to the subject /I,/ the causer, and the (indirect) object /you,/ the experiencer. *tlhIngan Hol vIghojmoH*/I teach Klingon./ The prefix *vI-*/I—he/she/it/they/ refers to the subject /I,/ the causer, and the (direct) object /Klingon language,/ the theme. *SoHvaD tlhIngan Hol vIghojmoH*/I teach you Klingon.**/The prefix *vI-* /I—he/she/it/they/ refers to the subject /I,/ the causer, and the (direct) object /Klingon language,/ the theme. The /you/ is an indirect object that the prefix does not agree with.

Since he didn’t give a grammatical explanation for the roles of subject and object with {-moH}, given the limited examples he gave in TKD, it appeared to imply that the subject role caused the action or state and the object role did the action or state, but as it turns out, it’s more complicated than that.

It is.

With {-moH}, “be hot” changes meaning to “cause-the-state-of-being-hot”, and THEN you process the other affixes.

So, {jItuj'eghmoH} means, “I cause-the-state-of-being-hot myself.”

Not necessarily. I might say, for instance, *puq **vIghojnISmoH.*//It might mean /I need to teach the child,/ or it might mean /I cause the child to need to learn./ You simply have to recognize that when *-moH* is used, you can't rely on the simple formula that subject = agent/experiencer/force, object = patient/theme/stimulus. That formula works for sentences without *-moH,* but not necessarily for those with it. Example from TKD: *HeghqangmoHlu'pu'*///it made him/her willing to die/. The thing that is causing the situation is indefinite, and the *-moH* and *-pu'* apply to it. He/she has possession of the dying and the willingness. *Heghqang ghaH* but *-moHlu'pu' *by the indefinite subject. But this would also be the word for /one//was willing to make him/her die./ Which suffix belongs to which entity is ambiguous. // //

Similarly, {nuvvaDvetlh tlhIngan Hol vIghojmoH} means, “For the benefit of that guy, I cause-learning the Klingon language.”

You obviously meant *nuvvetlhvaD.*

By comparison, he didn’t do squat to explain how {-moH} would change the way that a verb relates to its direct object.

Pretty much.

The TKD explanation of this was remarkably incomplete. Likely, it was written before Okrand decided how to handle ditransitive settings of a transitive verb + {-moH}, and I, for one, was thrown for a loop when his final canon examples came out.

I'm sure Okrand never even thought about how *chen tIjwI'ghom* becomes *tIjwI'ghom vIchenmoH* when he wrote it in TKD. It just seemed to make sense. *chenmoH* is /make,/ so /I make a boarding party./ I'm pretty sure that's as far as he'd worked it out in his head.

I’d argue that it should also make sense to say {tlhIngan Hol’e’ ghojwI’ ghojmoH ghojmoHwI’.} "As for the Klingon language, the teacher causes-learning the student," simply because it’s okay to say {ghojwI’ ghojmoH ghojmoHwI’}, and we’re just adding the topic of that causing-learning. There is no canon backing up this assertion. It’s just simple to understand using normal interpretation of Klingon grammar. It might seem stylistically odd, but there’s no reason to expect that a Klingon would wonder what it meant.

As you show with your /gooder/ example, there's the way things are said and there's what makes sense. This particular pattern (AvaD B VmoH C = C causes A to V B) is fairly well established now. That's not to say something else might not come up, but going against it would be like insisting on saying /gooder/ when you know perfectly well that's not right.

I doubt I would have had a problem with it if Okrand had presented the new canon with an expanded explanation of the grammar. Instead, he chose to imply unexpected rules of grammar without stating them. That’s always been the root of my problem with this area of grammar.

I wouldn't assign so much agency to Okrand about this. He's not sitting up at night cackling that he's tying us in knots. He's probably just still baffled why we argue about this stuff so much.

There’s the way it ought to be, and then there’s the way it is.

It oughtn't be /gooder;/ that's simply misapplication of a formula. As I've been talking about. There are deep historical reasons why we say /better/ instead of /gooder;/ it's not an arbitrary irregularity someone dreamed up one day.

There’s the issue of parsing. Most of the time, we see the prefix and we know who is doing the action or experiencing the state, and optionally to whom or to what the action is being done.

If the prefix implies a subject and an object and the verb is stative or otherwise is not supportive of having an object, we need to look ahead for {-moH} to make it make sense. If there is no {-moH}, then we need to see if the prefix has a third-person-singular object and hope we find {-lu’} as we continue to parse. If we don’t find either {-moH} or {-lu’} with a stative or otherwise intransitive verb with a prefix implying a direct object, then either we are reading poetry, or there’s been a grammatical error. [No, there is no discernible difference. Rely on context.]

We look at the entire verb. If there is a *-lu',* we use a special set of prefixes. If there is a *-moH,* we know the prefix will indicate a subject that causes the action and which may have another role, and an object, either direct or indirect, whose role in the sentence is not clear until we start looking at the meaning. If we don't see either of these, then it's simple: the subject is the agent/experiencer/force and the object is the patient/theme/stimulus.

If {-‘egh} or {-chuq} are there, we have to go back to the prefix and reinterpret it, assuming it is a “no object” prefix.

The prefix means whatever it means. Having a type 1 suffix simply means that some entity in the sentence is being referred to reflexively, and any object present in the sentence is not being acted upon by that reflexive entity.

We then take the indicated subject as both subject and object, with {-chuq} for plural subject, and {-'egh} usually for singular, though it could be plural if the group consists of individuals doing the action to themselves instead of to each other. It can be important to understand the difference between an invitation to {manga’chuq} and an invitation to {manga’’egh}, lest one show up unprepared.

[Perhaps that’s a mental image you’d like to be able to un-see. Too late, now.]

If the prefix implies a subject and an object, and we find {-chuq} or {-‘egh}, then we need to withhold interpretation until we’ve processed more suffixes, because {-moH} or {-lu’} OUGHT to be there.

If {-moH} is there, then if {-chuq} or {-'egh} is there, we need to forget anything we assumed about the prefix and start over, thinking about {-moH} BEFORE adding in {-‘egh} or {-chuq}.

If we hit {-lu’}, and we haven’t had {-‘egh}, {-chuq}, or {-moH}, then we check to make sure there’s a third person singular object indicated and reinterpret the prefix. If the prefix doesn’t fit {lu’}, then we’re reading poetry, or there’s been an error.

If we HAVE already been through {-chuq} or {-‘egh} and {-moH}, then our heads explode. Game over.

“In that room, one teaches each other to speak Klingon.”

{pa’vetlhDaq tlhIngan Hol lughojchuqmoHlu’.}

or perhaps

{pa’vetlhDaq tlhIngan Hol’e’ jeSwI’pu’vaD lughojchuqmoHlu’.} [Cue sound effects for the Lemmings game after clicking on the Time Bomb button]

[and one wonders why Bingon and other attempts to programmatically translate Klingon tend to render frequently erroneous results.]

So, yes, I can use {-moH} in the full glory of it’s functionality.

I just wish Okrand had done a gooder job of explaining it.

It's not as complicated as you're making it. If you stopped thinking syntactically, you'd see that. Take a verb with *-moH.* The subject causes the action. Any object is being acted upon in some way, whether being caused-unto or acted upon by the action. Any reflexive suffix simply means the reflexive entity acts upon itself. The verb prefix simply agrees with the subject and object; the prefix has no interest in the actual semantic roles in the sentence. *-lu'* does nothing except invoke a special set of prefixes, but these prefixes work exactly the same way as any other. Any other suffixes might apply to either subject or object. After that, you simply have to look to canon to determine how Klingon juggles semantic roles in various combinations. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name

On 4/16/2019 5:13 PM, Alan Anderson wrote:

On Apr 16, 2019, at 2:31 PM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name <mailto:sustel@trimboli.name>> wrote:

...

In a sentence without *-moH,* the situation is very simple. The subject is always the agent/theme/experiencer. Easy.

“Easy”? You’re introducing terms that you seem to think are widely understood, but your use of them doesn’t give much information about what you mean.

Tell me you're interested in learning about how semantics works. You give me a genuine, honest effort to understand it and I'll spend my time telling you about it. But your past behavior on this topic suggests to me that you're uninterested in talking about it. You've got what you've already decided, and you don't care to know anything else.

From your earlier attempts to explain your understanding of Klingon grammar, I was under the impression that agents and experiencers were different things, and I thought themes were something else as well. Searching the web, I find lists of noun roles that include those terms, and nowhere do I see them equated.

I didn't equate them. Those are alternative roles that the subject regularly plays in Klingon. *HoD vIqIp*/I hit the captain./ I am the agent. I deliberately take an action. *chal vIlegh*/I see the sky. /I am the experiencer. I receive sensory or emotional input. I am the subject of both sentences, but my semantic role is different. (And I erroneously said /theme/ when I meant to say /force./ But I wasn't listing exclusive possibilities, just possible alternatives.) Like I said, if you genuinely want an honest discussion of this, I'm happy to oblige, but I don't think you are. I think you just want to accuse me of something.

I still don’t understand the problem you have with calling the thing that causes the action the “subject of causation”. You tried to correct it by saying that “the subject causes”.  What’s the line you are drawing between them?

"The subject causes" is not a correction of the phrase "subject of causation." My problem with the phrase that "subject" is a purely syntactic term. In Klingon, the "subject" is simply that argument of a verb that comes after the verb, with which the verb prefix must agree. A Klingon subject is not always the entity that performs the action described by the verb; sometimes it causes that action instead. The problem is the splitting of the sentence into "subject of causation" and "subject of action." There is only ONE subject, and the verb prefix ALWAYS agrees with it, no matter what role that subject is playing. And if you go looking for multiple subjects tucked away inside words that aren't the subject, you get the grammar wrong. Because if you've got a "subject of causation" and a "subject of action," you're going to try to PUT those subjects somewhere, and you're going to try to make the verb prefix account for them. But they shift. Apparently for no reason. Actually, there ARE reasons, but you can't see if them if you're stuck on "subject." -- SuStel http://trimboli.name

On 4/16/2019 8:58 PM, De'vID wrote:

[SuStel's latest message arrived just as I was about to send this. So there may be some overlap. But in any case, since he's being accused of being unclear, I just wanted to say that (I think) I understand what he wrote. Whether it's correct or not is another thing, but I don't think it's unclear.]

Thank you! Much better said than I've been able to say it. I agree that whether I'm correct is another thing. I'm happy to adjust if something better comes along, and I'm no expert linguist. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name