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 ? ~ bara'qa'
On 9/30/2019 10:03 AM, mayqel qunen'oS 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 ?
It can mean either. When you've got *-moH,* you have to be careful when deciding whether the other suffixes refer to the causer or the doer of the action. It can be either. Context will tell. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On Sep 30, 2019, at 10:41 AM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
...It can be either. Context will tell.
If you’re worried that context *won’t* make your intended meaning clear, and if it is important to you that the intended meaning does get through clearly, that’s under your control. *Make* it clear. If it doesn’t matter which possible interpretation is received, don’t worry about it. -- ghunchu'wI'
On Mon, 30 Sep 2019 at 16:04, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@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
participants (4)
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Alan Anderson -
De'vID -
mayqel qunen'oS -
SuStel