On Wed, 18 Dec 2019 at 22:17, qurgh lungqIj <qurgh@wizage.net> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 4:06 PM SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

The answer is we don't know. The English glosses aren't enough to determine this. The reason he probably thinks this might be the split is because in English mate is something animals do, while have sex is something people do, and this is how the glosses were given to us. Whether the Klingon usages of the words matches the English usages of those phrases, we don't know. Star Trek makes this determination even murkier, since aliens are often said to mate with each other, while Terrans are not.

We do know that ngagh can refer to what "people" do, since we have {targhlIj yIngagh! yIruch!}. That's a clear example of one "person" telling another "person" to do an act with an "animal". To me, that usage seems to match with how we use the f-word, and is what led me to speculate that {ngagh} is what one thing does to another thing, regardless of if that thing would be classified as a "person" or an "animal". 

The example of {targhlIj yIngagh} tells us nothing about whether it's a verb that's *normally* used with "people", since the object is an animal and the entire sentence is intended to be an insult. It might be like "breed (with)" in English. It's normally used with animals, and if I were to tell a person to "go breed with [someone]", it would be insulting. We don't know whether the {targhlIj yIngagh} is insulting merely because the object is an animal, or if the verb used is also typically used only with animals. (By "animals", I mean non-people animals, of course.)

In other words, I'd steer clear of saying {luqara' ngagh qeylIS} or {qeylIS ngagh luqara'} and say {nga'chuq qeylIS luqara' je}.

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De'vID