[tlhIngan Hol] where the {-choH} applies

[De'vID]

On Mon, 30 Sep 2019 at 16:04, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:

> If I write {tubItchoHmoH} then what does it mean ?
>
> "You begin to cause me to be nervous"
>
> or
>
> You cause me to begin (i.e. you cause that I begin) to be nervous ?
>
> or can it mean both ?
>

I'm not sure that the Klingon sentence even makes that distinction. You're
just stating that "y'all making me nervous" in a way that implies a change
of state.

Previously: y'all weren't making me nervous.
Now: y'all making me nervous.

The way that you would normally state this in English forces you to be
explicit about whether the causer or the doer of the action has made a
change, when the sentence really means something like "it's beginning to be
the case that you make me nervous". Indeed, that change of state may have
even been caused by another party.

For example, you're on an away-team mission on a planet and you meet a
bunch of nice inhabitants. They invite you to their home and insist that
you stay. At first you think they're being overly polite, but then you
receive a secret comm from your captain that they just discovered previous
starship crews have gone missing after landing on this planet. The next
time your hosts insist, "Please, stay for the night", you might say
{tubItchoHmoH} (though you might not say it out loud). But it does not mean
exactly either "you begin to cause me to be nervous" (because their
behaviour hasn't changed) nor "you cause me to begin to be nervous"
(because it was your captain's comm that caused you to begin to be
nervous). And yet the Klingon sentence is true, because your hosts cause
you to be nervous, and that is a change of state from before.

-- 
De'vID
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20191001/79bc3816/attachment.htm>