: Re: Is the sentence "Love not self - love no one" easily understandable to an English reader? This question is not about syntactical correctness. I do not care about that. The only thing I care

@Sims2267584

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From a structure point of view, you're making it far too short to be easily understandable by a reader.

“Love not self - love no one”

It sounds more like a commandment to live by rather than a causal implication.
The fact that verbs are in their root forms makes the sentence look like an imperative statement: there will be people that, without any given context, will read said words as: "You shouldn't love yourself, nor love anyone else"

Depending on the context it could also feel like someone criticizing someone else: "You don't love yourself, you don't love at all".

Of course a part of the readers will (eventually) derive the intended meaning of "If you don't love yourself, you can't love anyone". But you're omitting a lot of the important bits of the sentence.

So:

Yes, it sounds unnatural.

You should focus on making it less synthetical to improve readability.

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