tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 08 10:46:57 1994
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Re: "Kiss"?
>Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 15:59:17 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>According to Joel Anderson:
>>
>> I suppose the lyric "shut up and kiss me" could
>> become
>>
>> "yItam 'ej wuSDu'wIj yIHot!"
>>
>> Leaving it up to the addressed party to decide what part to
>> do the touching with.
>>
>I wish there were a way to mash together affixes to allow:
>yItam 'ej muSDu'wIj yIHot'eghmoH.
>Yes, it is an ugly mess. Instead of the intended, "Shut up and
>cause our lips to touch each other," it more likely means,
>"Shut up and cause yourself to touch our lips."
>It just shows the way in which forced placement of affixes can
>exclude unusual meanings from finding expression.
I don't know that that's so bad. To me, "yIHot'eghmoH" is ambiguous
between "cause our lips to touch themselves" and "cause yourself to touch
our lips." Since the latter doesn't seem as common a phrase, I'd be more
inclined to interpret it as the former, which is what you wanted (tho as
you said, it should be -chuq instead of -'egh... and the -cuq makes it even
*more* plain which interpretation is needed).
Now, having said that, there's a big problem with all of this that only
Okrand can truly resolve. Note that he said that -'egh and -chuq can only
be used with zero-object prefixes. It somehow doesn't seem logical to me
that you can have a verb taking a direct object and still using the
zero-object prefixes, so I guess you'd have to use the old "'e' qaSmoH"
circumlocution or something. Or perhaps Okrand got carried away and
overstated matters when he said that about zero-object prefixes (something
I'm quite prepared to accept).
>charghwI'
~mark