tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Apr 27 19:30:44 1998

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Correct me if I'm wrong but..

From: Joel Peter Anderson <[email protected]>

>This comes up from time to time

Indeed it does.

>- though here it seems obvious that lIj is
>better, I'd expect that Klingons lack unanimity on this, as do humans. The
>line between sentience and perceived sentience is blurry enough so that it
>is pretty common to refer to dogs, computers, cars, sea monkeys, lizards
>and whatnot as possesing will and even speech.  (but never cats {{:) )  It
>is up to the speaker if s/he intends the creature to be understood as
>sentient.

I recently thought of a way to explain my viewpoint on this matter.  You
know how many languages have grammatical gender?  The quality of gender is
inherent to the word, not simply the concept the word embodies.  In Spanish,
for instance, a word for "ship" or "boat" is "barco," a masculine noun.
This masculinity has nothing to do with real life gender.  However, other
Spanish words *do* have a connection to real life gender, and the difference
between two nouns, often the last "o" or "a," is entirely one of both real
life and grammatical gender.  (For instance, "muchacho" and "muchacha.")

Now, suppose a ship (and speaking in a rather science-fictional way should
be perfectly understandable to this particular audience) were to gain a
personality, whether computerized, or magical, or whatever.  And suppose
this personality were decidedly *feminine*.  Do you start to call the ship a
"barca"?  I'm no expert in Spanish, but my Spanish-English dictionary gives
me a slightly different translation of "barca": "boat, launch, barge."

I can't say for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that the gender is tied up
in the word, not in the context.  With the feminine ship, I'm sure some
Spanish speakers would waffle between the two words, but generally, wouldn't
"barco" be the correct term?  If there are any native speakers of a language
with grammatical gender reading this, what would you consider to be
"correct"?

I see a possibly similar thing with Klingon sentience suffixes.  {jan} "devi
ce" takes a non-sentient suffix, for instance, {janwIj} "my device."  Now
suppose this device were to take on an intelligence.  Do we start calling it
{janlI'}?  Perhaps, but not so easily as that.  I don't think the difference
between {-wIj} and {-wI'} is meant to be a judgement call on the part of
each individual speaker, but either (1) is a purely grammatical matter, with
certain words automatically given the non-sentient suffixes despite their
newly-acquired intelligence, or (2) is something which has to be accepted on
a very wide level before it is considered correct.  An example of the latter
would be Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Most "robots" (and I'm
not particularly interested in Star Trek's differences between "robots" and
"androids") are not sentient, and yours would be called {qoqlIj}.  Data, on
the other hand, is very widely accepted as sentient (and this is backed up
by legal precedent and law in the Federation), and therefore when refering
to him as "your robot" (for whatever reason), {qoqlI'} would be correct.

Pets, however dear they are to you, are still {SajlIj}, and they will
continue to be so until all pets are widely accepted to be sentient.  Until
then, it is simply ungrammatical to use the sentient-suffixes.  A little
ungrammaticallity when talking to your pets is all fine and dandy, but you
should be aware that it IS an error.  Certainly, you should not expect
others to refer to your pet with a sentience-indicating suffix just because
you do.

I've found that when presenting my opinions in this step-by-step manner,
people start to boil unless I provide a disclaimer, so here it is: this is
my opinion, and I am in no way trying to dictate to you how you should talk
to Fido.  Why this disclaimer seems to make a difference, I'm not sure, but
there you are.

SuStel
Stardate 98321.0

Back to archive top level