tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 28 14:31:03 1998
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Re: Correct me if I'm wrong but..
According to David Trimboli:
>
> 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?
You came SO close to the viewpoint that I recently came to,
myself and then stepped aside. Grammatical gender often has
arbitrary boundaries. We may logically think that grammatical
gender in Klingon SHOULD be related to sentience, but I suspect
it simply has to do with whether or not a noun can use
language. Sentience is not the issue. Language skill is perhaps
the ONLY issue in determining Klingon gender.
> 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.
No. They will continue to be {SajlIj} until they are widely
accepted as being able to use language. We may argue about
where the threshold lies between being able to use language and
merely mimicking it or suggesting it, but the point is not
sentience. The point is use of language.
> 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.
I think you are correct in your manner of application of an
incorrect criterion. I think you are right about gender being
an arbitrary, fixed part of the language, not really flexible
to the current whim of the speaker, but I think we should drop
this fiction about sentience and get to the explicitly stated
definition of gender in Klingon (if we consider these suffixes
to be differentiated by grammatical gender).
> SuStel
> Stardate 98321.0
charghwI'