tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jun 20 16:30:49 1999
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Re: Love (jIjegh!)
jIja'pu':
>I'm puzzled at your reluctance to accept {-Ha'} as able to express
>"do the opposite of" in general.
ja' qa'ral:
>Au contraire! It was my eagerness to accept it that got me into trouble
>in the first place. I tried to apply the "do the opposite of" sense to
>/muSHa'/ and so establish that Klingon does after all have a verb *to
>love*.
You have reasonably found a way to translate one particular concept that
can be represented by the English verb "love". You have not established
that {muSHa'} is generally applicable to the word "love" beyond an obvious
"un-hate" or "mis-hate" meaning.
>My respondents were adamant that /muSHa'/ does not signify
>*love*, but rather the *undoing* of a prior state of hate. I phrased
>this as *no longer hate* because the translations that were
>suggested--*un-hate* and *dis-hate*--are so unnatural in English. If
>you hate something and then *undo* that hate, you *no longer hate it*.
>At least that's my understanding.
You're misunderstanding the focus on the "undo" idea, then. TKD says it
represents a "change of state" rather than a "not done" idea, but that's
a little misleading. It doesn't have to be a change in state from what
the non-suffixed verb says. The way I see it, ou don't have to have a
change in state from "tight" to "loose" in order for {QeyHa'} to apply.
You just have to have something end up being loose that wasn't loose to
begin with; otherwise {Qeybe'} "not tight" would work as well or better.
In any case, "undo" is only one of the two explicit uses for {-Ha'} given
by TKD, the other being "wrongly". I can't point to any canon explanation
for why I think "opposite" works so well in many cases; my understanding of
{-Ha'} has an underlying meaning that doesn't translate well into English.
-- ghunchu'wI'