[tlhIngan Hol] negating adverbials

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Feb 24, 2019, at 23:06, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> There's one canon sentence which might indicate that {-be'} applied to a verb with an adverbial negates the adverbial:
> {Hoch DaSopbe'chugh batlh bIHeghbe'.} "Eat everything or you will die without honor." (Power Klingon) 
> 
> But the grammar was never explained, and it's only one example, and arguably the meaning doesn't change whether the verb or the adverbial is negated ("one does not die with honour" is the same as "one dies without honour", if you assume everyone dies, so the statement is true for all mortals at least).

Hmm, interesting. If I had been asked to translate that sentence from English to Klingon, I might have written it as {batlhHa' bIHegh}, but that would mean “you will die dishonorably”, which could be subtly different from “you will die without honor.”

> Possibly relevant:
> {nom yIghoSqu'!} "Maximum speed!" (Star Trek V)
> 
> Here, the rover {-qu'} is attached to {ghoS}, but the emphasis is actually being placed on {nom}. 

“Maximum speed” could also just be a loose translation for “really go fast!”, though.

Anyway, yeah, the evidence you presented os certainly not sufficient to suggest that one can negate or emphasize an adverbial by negating or emphasizing its verb. I was thinking about how I might recast the sentences {reH qaSbe'} and {tlhoy nI'be' HaSta tavam 'e' vItul} to avoid touching upon unresolved issues of grammar, and I’m not sure I found a satisfactory solution.

I briefly considered {-Ha'} on the adverbial but {reHHa'} and {thoyHa'} both seemed off for reasons I couldn’t quite pin down. In context, both sentences were corrections to times I misspoke: I initially said {reH vInIHtaH} and {tlhoy nI' HaSta tavam}, respectively, and wanted to correct my meaning. For the first one, the intended corrected meaning was {pIj} instead of {reH}, so it should have been fine to just say {pIj}, but for the second one I’m still not sure what would have been better. It was part of an SAO and {tlhoy nI' HaSta tavam 'e' vItulbe'} comes close enough to the meaning that I intended that I think it would have been fine if I had said that, but I’d be interested to hear suggestions from others on how that might be recasted.