tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 19 20:02:42 2002
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RE: QeD De'wI' ngermey
On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, DloraH wrote:
> > > feeling that curse warfare is about to resume....
> >
> > QInvam vIlaDbe'pa' mu'qaD veS vItagh! :)
>
> /laDbe'pa'/ ?
"I didn't read this message before I started the curse warfare."
(or what I was really going for was "I read this message after I started
it"...) Qu'vatlh, I got confused. I don't need the { -be' } in there,
because { -pa' } is indicating I performed the core statement before the
clause... Shoot, I'm still getting confused.
{ -pa' } means "before", but that's really only how it translates. The
action described in the clause with { -pa' } actually occurs *after* the
main statement, it's just translated as the prepositional phrase "before
X"... Right?
I was actually thinking of the { -be'pa' } construction as a way of
indicating "after", although now that I'm thinking more about it, I
realize I could've just reversed the main clause with the relative clause,
dropped the negation and conveyed basically the same idea... Which would
still have been wrong because I was thinking about the effects of { -pa' }
in the reverse order... Bleah. :)
...Paul
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