tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 28 03:50:32 1998
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RE: Correct me if I'm wrong but..
> I recently thought of a way to explain my viewpoint on this matter. You
> know how many languages have grammatical gender?
[...]
> I see a possibly similar thing with Klingon sentience suffixes. {jan}
> "device" 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.
But, if it were a purely grammatical marker, then it would have no
correlation to real-world sentience or language use, and every word in the
lexicon would have to be explicitly identified as a language-using word or
non-language-using word. That's what's happening in Spanish; a "chicken" is
masculine, whether it's male or female. It's a masculine _word_, not a
masculine entity. In Klingon, sentience is a property of the entity, not
the word.
> SuStel
> Stardate 98321.0
--Holtej