tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 02 07:02:42 1999
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Re: the scope of {-be'}
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 17:25:42 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
charghwI', now you're applying the same inflexible logic that we always
caution you not to, but this time you're applying it to prove yourself
WRONG when you aren't. Or at least, not completely.
>But there is a canon example that proves that at least once
>Okrand has made the same perverse use of negation that you do.
>So, you have already won this argument, or perhaps I should say
>the language has already lost this argument.
No, it means that AT LEAST ONCE it works that way. It doesn't mean your
way of looking at it is wrong, it means that when the meaning drives it,
the other way of looking at it can be right too. I'm generally inclined to
see -be' as applying, if at all possible, only to what immediately precedes
it, just as you do. But since {batlh bIHeghbe'} doesn't make sense as "You
will honorably not die", at least in context, it must work the other way,
THERE.
>The twisted logic one allows when overgeneralizing the
>observation that sometimes different things look a lot alike can
>really make a mess of things. So, you want to make a rule that
>different things can never be different because sometimes they
>look alike. Sometimes XYbe'Z can be equally evaluated as
>(XY)be' Z, or as X (Y)be' Z, so let's just say these things
>always mean the same thing.
It's the danger of generalizing from a single example (or very few).
~mark