tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jul 14 20:44:07 1998
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Re: -Curses
- From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: -Curses
- Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 15:40:00 -0400
From: Alan Anderson <[email protected]>
>mujang SuStel:
>>Very well. Please tell us a Klingon epithet which has been used as a
noun.
>
>How about {qeylIS'e' lIjlaHbe'bogh vay'} "Kahless the Unforgettable"?
That's not a Klingon epithet which has been used as a noun. That's a
Klingon noun (phrase) which has been used as an epithet.
>I'm sure you have a narrower interpretation of "Klingon epithet" in mind.
My interpretation is that the curse words, including the epithets, which do
seem to constitute their own type, are listed as exclamations. There are
Klingon {chuvmey} which can be further analyzed by non-Klingons as
exclamations, and which can be used as epithets, and there is the broader
idea of an epithet, which is name-calling in general.
I'm talking about the specific sort of {chuvmey}, not epithets in general.
Epithets in general can most certainly be used in ordinary sentences. The
{chuvmey} epithets certainly might, but we've never seen them in any at all,
and they're *not* {DIpmey}.
*Maybe* these particular {chuvmey} can be used as {DIpmey}, but we simply
have no proof of that, beyond Star Trek scriptwriter's woefully inadequate
interpretation of Klingon (and Okrand's backfitting of this).
>I cannot point to a phrase *written by Marc Okrand* in which one of the
>words labeled as an epithetical curse in TKD is used in a larger sentence.
That is the main point.
>However, I have already offered a line of television dialogue (which you
>dismissed as irrelevant): "You speak the lies of a {taHqeq}."
What I dismiss that this line can be used as any sort of proof. It is
simply a line which happens to match what you're looking for. Certainly it
may reflect the truth, but the writer of this line has no "authority," as we
define canon for Klingon, to determine how epithets work.
Here's a thought. If epithet {chuvmey} can be used as nouns, why are they
so hard to translate? Perhaps the cultural differences are great, but I
can't see this as applying to *every* {chuvmey} (or is that {chuv}?).
Someone, somewhere, would find a suitable translation, but we don't have
such a thing, just suitable situations in which it's used.
On the other hand, if epithet {chuvmey} were only used as exclamations, as I
have speculated (and not "claimed," as such), then it would make sense that
we don't have any good translations of them. Since they are used in
exclamations we know what sort of situations they are used in (this is the
information we *do* know about many of them), and the lack of context in
every such utterance would also account for our lack of translations.
It's also notable that all of the epithets (in the general sense) which we
*do* have the translations for are {DIpmey}, not {chuvmey}.
>I can also
>cite several occasions where the words {toDSaH}, {petaQ}, and {yIntagh}
>(in its epithetical sense) have been used as nouns by other people while
>they were writing in Klingon (which you will doubtless dismiss as well).
Of course. If anybody can write their own sort of Klingon and make it
official list policy, we'd have chaos.
>Why do you deny the meaning of the term "epithet"? It's not a Klingon
>grammatical term; you can't claim that we don't know what it means. You
>might as well deny the label "adverbial" or "pronoun" or even "number".
Notice that these three terms are just as artificially introduced in TKD as
"epithet." None of them are Klingon grammatical terms, they are all terms
introduced into TKD by Terrans, including the classification of "epithet."
An "epithet" is a sub-category of "exclamation," which itself is a category
of {chuvmey}.
"Epithet" IS defined in TKD. It is defined as an exclamation. Until we see
SOME evidence that this definition is not as clear-cut as it is made out to
be in that book, I will continue to regard the epithet {chuvmey} as
exclamations.
SuStel
Stardate 98534.8