[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: yItlhHa'

[De'vID]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 at 22:06, nIqolay Q <niqolay0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 1:24 PM Felix Malmenbeck <felixm at kth.se> wrote:
>
>> > The use of the suffix {-Ha'} does not imly that the situation or the
>> > action was different before. It's just the opposite meaning.
>>
>> While there are some canonical examples that may suggest this to be the
>> case (words like {jaQHa'} come to mind), the original description in TKD
>> suggests that it requires either an undoing of a previous state/action, or
>> that something is done wrongly:
>>
>
> Based on {jaQHa'}, {yItlhHa'}, and so on, I've suspected for a while that
> {-Ha'} has expanded to include the idea of "the exact opposite quality", at
> least in some cases. There's never been any confirmation one way or
> another, though, so I've been reluctant to use it that way. For now, I have
> it mentally filed away as an idiomatic usage of verb suffixes, like
> {HIvneS}. Or maybe it's an expansion of the "wrongly" meaning -- being
> lenient is definitely the wrong way to be strict.
>

It seems to me that {-Ha'} acts differently depending on whether the verb
is a verb of quality (a "to be" verb) or an action, and whether it is
reversible or not (or to put it another way, whether the opposite state or
action is considered to be related to the original verb by a reversal).

Here are examples of the four possible verb types:
{ghungHa'} "be unhungry" (be satiated, as being hungry is a state which can
be undone or reversed)
{jaQHa'} "be shallow" (while the act of making something deep is
reversible, being deep itself is not, so this is just the opposite state)
{jotlhHa'} "put back up" ({jotlh} is considered to have a reverse or
opposite action)
{jatlhHa'} "misspeak" ({jatlh} is not reversible or has no opposite, so
this has to be interpreted as "speak wrongly")

I think that {jotlhHa'} *cannot* be interpreted as "take down wrongly" and
{jatlhHa'} *cannot* be understood as "un-speak". Of course, for some verbs,
it may not be possible to tell based on the definition whether Klingons
consider them to be reversible or not, like {'ey}.

Now someone will post canon counterexamples which prove my observation
wrong.

-- 
De'vID
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