tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 19 08:03:55 1995

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Re: jImawqu'wI' (was: Re: young Klingons)

Steve Weavervo':

> jImawqu'wI'.

Funny, we were just talking about this, and here it is.  While I understand
the meaning, as I think anyone would, it seems incredibly unnatural of a way
to say this to me.  
Why not /mawqu'wI' jIH/, or /jImawqu'/?  

I guess this is my point.  You're trying for something like "I am one who
really offends", right?  But you can't combine "I offend" /jImaw/ with "one
who does" /-wI'/ to get that meaning.  It would be something like * "one who
does I offend."  To take a cue from the translation, you really want there to
be a copula in there.  See, your 'word' is intended to be a noun, it's not a
complete sentence.  You either want to use the pronoun construction as a
copula (second choice), or just use /maw/ as the verb it was born to be!

I think I will adopt this as my crusade: to make people stop using prefixes
on nominalized verbs!

--Holtej

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