tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Dec 19 18:51:31 2010

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Re: monastery

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv ([email protected]) 

While I'm always happy to get new words, I find a few things bothersome:

1. It seems that Okrand is down to nouns. It's what people ask him for. It's what he gives. It's been a while since he gave us anything else.

2. While we originally complained about his glosses as being overly vague, he now gives us less of a gloss than an even more vague and lengthy definition that is difficult to put in a dictionary in any manner that makes it functional to look up the English definition and find the word. This one is a classic example. He gives us an entire paragraph, and we honestly are clueless as to whether or not Okrand intended this to be the building complex or the people in it. Is it a location, a cultural organization or a society? We don't know. Different people have strong opinions about it, but they don't agree.

My personal response is that I feel fortunate in that as an atheist, I probably won't need this word very often, so I don't have to struggle to clarify wtf I'm talking about if I use it, and if someone else uses it, it will probably be about a topic I won't mind if it's a bit vague, because it won't make a lot of sense to me either way.

lojmit tI'wI'nuv

On Dec 19, 2010, at 9:05 PM, R Fenwick wrote:

> 
> jIjatlh:
>> Indeed, if a {ghIn} is really more the community than the building, and if
>> Okrand's note on the term "religious" in the gloss offers as much latitude
>> as it seems to, I wonder if, say, the Old Order Amish (not a monastery in
>> any usual sense of the word) could be considered a {ghIn}.
> 
> ghItlhpu' naHQun, jatlh:
>> So now I have to ask, is a ghIn defined by geography? There's an Amish
>> community a few hours North of me. There is a defined geographic area for
>> this group.
>> But other religious communities don't necessarily have the same boundaries.
>> They live intermingled with other religious and non-religious groups.
>> Can I refer to the yID ghIn in Indianapolis? Despite the fact that they are
>> spread out? Or the yID ghIn in general; with a global perspective?
> 
> Again, this is all based upon impressions; feel free to ignore my ramblings.
> 
> YMMV, but for me Okrand's gloss of "monastery" - no doubt the original prompt
> for {ghIn} - implies a certain degree of both social and physical cohesion and
> insularity, if not outright seclusion. So if you said {yID ghIn}, I probably
> wouldn't understand that to mean "the Jewish religious community" in the more
> general sense, since that community are, as you say, intermingled with various
> other groups both socially and geographically.
> 
> In the absence of any other data, the impression I get is that a {ghIn} might
> form a kind of {nughHom} or a {lalDan nughHom}: not really substantial enough
> to be a distinct culture or society, but a small unit that acts like one in
> many senses, having its own established rules, interactions and mores and in
> some ways separate from the {nugh} at large.
> 
> QeS 'utlh
> 		 	   		  
> 
>

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