tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 19 23:06:58 1997

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Re: KLBC: insulting



On 19 Nov 97 at 10:03, William H. Martin wrote:

> I REALLY wish people would stop trying to make sense out of the
> pieces of Klingon words. I mean, what does "restaurant" have to do
> with "rest"ing or "rant"ing? And what does a "tower" have to do with
> debt? It does have the word "owe" in it, after all.
> 
> Care to explain the etymology which brought the words "fat" and
> "her" together to form the word "father"? One supposes it would be a
> similar explanation for a similar word beginning with the word
> "mat".
> 
> And is the root word for disheveled "sheveled" or "heveled"? I
> don't really remember either one used very frequently without
> the prefix.

In nearly all of these cases you "cut up" currently existing words 
at other boundaries than between syllables, which is "stupid" indeed. 
That's not really how words form (I think).
 
> Sometimes a word is just a word. The pieces which appear to
> combine to form the word often have absolutely nothing to do
> with the larger word. Deal with it.

You're so right. But since we do not really know that much for sure 
about things like ethymology in tlhIngan Hol (or even about syllables 
and the like in Klingon words) it can be so nice to guess from time 
to time and thus explore potential possibilities...

And in the case of these insults some of the things Lieven came up 
with (the parts he came up with and the meanings of these parts in 
current tlhIngan) seemed to somehow make sense in some distant way 
(to me at least).

Qapla'
peSHIr

Jarno Peschier, computer science student, Utrecht University
   mailto:[email protected]    http://jarno.home.ml.org/
____________________________________________________________
    'avwI' nejDI' narghta'bogh qama' reH 'avwI' Sambej


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