Re: "be'be'" - double negation

["Rohan Fenwick" <rfenwick18@hotmail.com>]

"This kingdom thou shalt not take for thine own, wrongfully; for many others 
have laboured here no less than thou." - John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The 
Ainulindale Silmarillion

jIjatlh:
 >
 > charghwI' suggested that there is always another way around such 
sentences
 > as this one - my example, <<muHoHbe'vIpbe'>>, "he is not afraid to not 
kill
 > me" (better: I am not afraid to leave you alive), could also be written
 > <<muHoHbe' 'e' chenvIpmoHbe'>> "He will not kill me. He is not afraid to 
do
 > that." It's wordier, but it conforms to canon better.

jatlh Will:

>charghwI' feels like he's being paraphrased enough that he asked me to 
>speak
>for him, since this discussion involves a lot more English text than he 
>cares
>to wade through. charghwI' and I both feel like {-be'be'} is almost never a
>good idea and can be recast, but we don't really see a problem with
>{muHoHbe'vIpbe'}. It is efficient and expressive and not all that 
>ambiguous.

vaj maQochbe'.

>Meanwhile, I see your alternative suggestion as a curious use of the verb
>{chen}, and {-be'} is pretty clearly misplaced in {chenvIpmoHbe'}, since 
>I'd
>translate it as, "He is afraid to not cause that to form."

qatlho' 'ej jImuj. jIQaghpu'.

 > BTW, I have also had a sentence containing <<not>> and the suffix 
<<-be'>>
 > vetoed; hence, the double negative <<-be'be'>>, one after the other,
 > probably isn't a good idea.

>THAT is usually just a mistake. Likely, that's what I wrote about earlier. 
>In
>some languages (and English slang dialects) the "double negative" in "I 
>ain't
>never goin' there again," is an emphatic, rather than a logical reversal of 
>one
>negative by the other. It has the opposite meaning of "I will never not go
>there again." So far as we know, Klingon always adhere's to the logical 
>string
>of negatives reversing each other rather than emphasizing each other. 
>That's
>really the nugget in the middle of this confused thread.

You are correct again. I believe you were the one to point out - correctly - 
the mistake in my original <<not>> + <<-be'>> sentence, and upon rereading, 
that IS what you wrote about.

jIlaDHa'qa'pu'. qatlho'qu' mughojmoHmo' yablIj.

Qapla' 'ej Satlho'

ro'Han

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