<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">I never said he should not translate his musings into Klingon. I merely explained that a Klingon probably would have either expressed it more clearly (as with your two excellent suggested alternatives), or, if the context was so obvious that misspeaking this badly would still convey clear meaning, that a Klingon like myself would not bother speaking at all since everybody already knows what he intended to say.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Let's get back to the original example, which you appear to wish to defend as acceptable, even if everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY, agrees that your suggested alternatives are better.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">His English sentence was: "I won't destroy my life because of her.” He admitted it was ambiguous and he made it clear that he did NOT mean that she was the cause of him not destroying his life, then he attempted a word-by-word-without-reference-to-the-underlying-meaning translation of the original, ambiguous English sentence.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">He picked the wrong negative suffix, since {-be’} utterly fails to convey the willful refusal to perform the action of the verb. It implies a passive lack of action. Both your translations used {-Qo’}, instead, and you were right to do so.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The Klingon version he proposed was {ghaHmo', yInwIj vIQaw'be’}.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The only way this works as a translation other than what he has explained he does NOT want to express, is to interpret it as “I destroyed my life because of her — not.”</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I know that we’ve established in years past on this list that though the negative rover, {-be’} most commonly applies primarily to the syllable that immediately precedes it, it can more rarely have a grammatical scope beyond the verb itself to include everything preceding it in the sentence. I won’t fall into the trap of overlooking that or forgetting that. It’s a past argument that you won, and I’m not interested in repeating the argument, fantasizing some other outcome.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">All you get out this uncommon parsing is, “It is not the case that I destroyed my life because of her.” </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">That’s kind of vague, don’t you think? If it’s not the case that he destroyed his life because of her, then what exactly is the case? What is he saying?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">“I destroyed my life because of her,” is a false statement. So, what is the true statement?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I think this fully qualifies as vague, wittering, and indecisive, hence my aversion to the translation.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I like it, not.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">
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<div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jan 10, 2020, at 1:59 PM, SuStel <<a href="mailto:sustel@trimboli.name" class="">sustel@trimboli.name</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/10/2020 10:07 AM, Will Martin
wrote:<br class="">
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<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:45390437-D814-4F90-963B-1FBFA9952FFD@mac.com" class="">
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<div class="">I never said he couldn’t say it. I just gave my
opinion, as a cultural Klingon, about whether or not he should.</div>
</blockquote><p class="">So you were saying that mayqel, who has on many occasions
insisted that he is not pretending to be a Klingon, should not
translate his musings on his ex into Klingon?</p><p class="">I'm sure I missed the part in <i class="">Power Klingon</i> where we're
told that Klingons do not think about past relationships.<br class="">
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
SuStel
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://trimboli.name/">http://trimboli.name</a></pre>
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