On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 3:54 AM, mayqel qunenoS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:

Recently, I saw in a sentence written by an expert the {-be'} used on {-lu'}.

I won't say who wrote it, nor will I quote the exact sentence, since these details are of no importance.

Suffice it to say, that it was on a transitive verb (not that if the verb was intransitive, it would make any difference).

So, I was wondering how on earth, this sentence could be correct.

If I wrote {Soplu'be'}, then what would this mean ? "not someone unspecified eats" ? And if I want to say "not someone unspecified eats", then why not just write {Sop (subject)} ?

This would only work out if negating {-lu'} negated the "unspecified" part, which is not the only possible interpretation of {-lu'be'}. There is no official interpretation of this combination yet. But based on the way people use it, it seems that they often interpet {-lu'be'} as, and intend it to mean, something like "nobody (but in a vaguer, more unspecified sort of way than 'pagh')". Usually, this ends up conveying the same basic idea as {wotbe'lu'}: something doesn't happen and it's not important or known who's not doing it.

I wouldn't say it's out-and-out wrong, because it's never been forbidden explicitly, and I don't want to assume that some novel combination of suffixes is ungrammatical simply because we don't know precisely what it means. But it is still undefined.