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 about is to be understood properly. That's why I'm asking it here and not ELL.
The meaning of sentence is "If you don't love yourself, you can love no one" or "To love someone else you should love yourself at first". So, does the given sentence associate with these sentences in the minds of English-speaking people? Or is it too unnatural?
So, the question is how to write that. As in the title or as an alternatives in the body?
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1 answer
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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