[tlhIngan Hol] Imperatives and {-be'}

De'vID de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com
Thu Jul 6 16:26:55 PDT 2017


On 6 July 2017 at 17:28, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> On 7/6/2017 11:14 AM, mayqel qunenoS wrote:
>
>> Apologising once more in advance for quoting boQwI', I need to bring this
>> up, because there I read that..

Stop claiming to be "quoting" {boQwI'} when what you're doing is
paraphrasing things out of context.

Primary sources are annotated in {boQwI'}, and extra-canonical notes
are in a footer section in a smaller font. Please just ignore the
footer section until you understand the primary sources.

>> "Even though tkd says that {-be'} cannot be used with imperatives, it seems
> that this means only that it cannot be used to form negative imperatives.
>> For example, a sentence such as {HIleghbe'moH} seems to be possible"
>
>> I can't understand this. Isn't the {HIleghbe'moH} a negative imperative ?
>> Doesn't it mean "make me not see !" ?
>
> boQwI' is wrong.

That snippet isn't from the main entry, but from an additional notes
section with extra-canonical things like puns, observations from
comments made on the mailing list, and so on. In this case, it's
recording an observation (apparently made by Qov in Feb. 2014) that
the statement in TKD is implicitly "{-be'} cannot be used *with*
imperative verbs [to negate them]" (emphasis mine, and the implicit
part in [brackets]), but a possible reading of the statement doesn't
rule out that the imperative verb has a {-be'} *in* it (where it is
not negating the whole verb).

I no longer have the context for the observation, but presumably Qov
used such a construction in one of her stories and was called out on
it. Does anyone remember (or can find the original comment in the
archives)?

-- 
De'vID



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