On 7/9/2021 10:36 AM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
SuStel:
Legal possession and physical possession are not the same as grammatical possession. Klingon, like English, uses the concept of possession to represent relationships between people. My child (and puqwI') means the relationship between me and the person is that of parent (me) and child.
Yes, I understand. That's why I can't understand ghunchu'wI' saying that writing {be'wI'} could be a transgression.
{be'wI'} = my woman, which in hector's case means "my wife". If someone calls the woman he's married to "my wife/my woman" then does he transgress in some way?
It's because /woman/ does not imply a relationship to anyone, so saying /my woman/ is implying actual ownership. In contemporary English, that is. If someone calls a woman /my woman,/ a lot of people will consider it to be socially regressive. An ancient Trojan character might very well say equivalent of /my woman/ in his own language and mean ownership, as that was the common practice at the time. But you were offering these ancient rules as rules to live by today, so ghunchu'wI' said that if he referred to his wife as /my woman,/ it would be unacceptable, because he does not own her. We do hear Klingons on TV refer to /woman/ in the possessive, though it's unclear how much control or ownership is involved. But you didn't offer the advice to Klingons, or even ancient Trojans; you offered it to modern humans, and primarily English-speaking ones at that. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name