tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 10 17:21:12 1998
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Re: WORDS (ridges etc)
>Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 12:38:41 -0800 (PST)
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>
>According to David Trimboli:
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
>> To: Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
>> Date: Sunday, February 01, 1998 4:29 AM
>> Subject: Re: WORDS (ridges etc)
>>
>>
>> >I never before considered such constructions as gheghwI'Du'. Being part of
>> >debates on this listserv has caused me to reread our source materials many
>> >times. This can be very revealing.
>>
>> There may not BE a word for ridges, or it may be a word we have not yet
>> learned. You should consider using {ghegh} as a verb only.
>
>I agree. For me, the word {Quch} MEANS ridges. A Klingon
>forehead is distinguised as the part of the head with ridges.
>No ridges, no forehead. Humans don't really HAVE foreheads.
>They have the location a forehead should be, but it isn't a
>real forehead, hence the insult, {Hab SoSlI' Quch!} The insult
>is that your mother doesn't have a REAL forehead. She just has
>one of those ugly, smooth areas where a forehead should be.
That seems overly restrictive to me (and also unsupported speculation). An
alien race which had no nose would still have a face, right? And yet to us
a face implies a nose, since our faces all have noses (and so do the faces
of all our animals. Do all Klingon animals have ridged foreheads?) A
being with no navel still has a belly, etc.
>Would you refer to someone's eyes if they just had smooth
>indentations with no eyeballs? Meanwhile, we don't usually talk
>about people's eyeballs. You would not say to your true love,
>"I love to gaze into your eyeballs."
It's the other way 'round. "Eyes" does refer specifically to eyeballs, and
we do not normally say "I love to gaze into your eye sockets."
>> 'IH QuchDaj ghegh.
>> Her rough forehead is beautiful.
>
>That's really like saying, "Her round baseball is beautiful."
>If it wasn't round, it would not only fail to be beautiful. It
>would fail to be a baseball. If her forehead were not rough, it
>would not only not be beautiful. It would not be a forehead.
I dispute the truth of this, and even were it true the statement would not
be meaningless. "Her round baseball is beautiful" does have a meaning: it
emphasizes the roundness of the baseball, which, aside from being a
defining characteristic of baseballs (assuming that's true), is also an
being considered as an aesthetic condition of them. After all, there are
varying degrees of roundness, and ridgedness. By emphasizing that the
baseball is round, or the forehead is ridged, the speaker is pointing out
that it partakes of that defining characteristic in a particularly strong,
or perhaps simply well-proportioned, way.
>> ghegh Ruffles.
>> (One of those utterances which can't make the transition between languages.)
>
>Would a Klingon consider Ruffles to be food?
Probably they're building insulation.
~mark