tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Aug 20 11:56:32 1993

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tlhIngan mu'mey Qut (Klingon swear words)



[email protected] writes:

>(Mark E. Shoulson) shoulson <[email protected]> wrote on Mon 9 Aug
>93
>15:33:31 -0400 (Subject: tlhIngan mu'mey Qut) allocating meanings to the
>Klingon swear words in TKD. But running these words through my Klingon ->
>English analyser shows that many of them have other meanings:-

I find trying to analyze the curses and such with the analyzer an amusing
pastime, but I can't really view such things as carrying any real weight
when it comes to thinking about meanings (neither do my musings, of
course).  After all, using an English "parser" we can come up with the
perfectly legitimate phrase "I understand the ceiling" which *should* be a
perfectly sensible, reasonable thing to say.... but isn't.  "I'm looking
over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before" takes on a whole new, and
more pedestrian, meaning.  Granted, in these cases the derivation really
*did* come from the obvious places, but the meanings can become so vastly
removed as makes no difference.  And there are probably cases of similar
words like that that are completely unrelated (e.g. delight has nothing to
do with making darkness!  In fact, delight isn't even related to light at
all, its spelling was changed from "delite" (borrowed from French) to
conform with "light" under the mistaken idea that they were related).

Even with fairly strained usages, I can't really se most of these
"precursors" to the curses used very much, certainly not often enough to
have fossilized them into words themselves.  Why would Klingons use
military duty stations as a curse at all?

>  > yIntagh: Stupid. Dumb as rocks. This is a direct attack at the
>intelligence of the victim. May have overtones of petaQ and toDSaH as well:
>soft, spoiled, and utterly useless, with stupidity as the overriding
>factor.
>- N:life_support_system
>- N:life N:lung*
>  I suppose that life support systems, even if computerized and with a
>degree
>of ability to make decisions, are not known for general intelligence
>compared
>with people's brains. Perhaps. Still seems an odd thing to call someone.

You bet it is.  I doubt it's what people were called, leastways not with
life-support-system in mind as its meaning.  It's my take that the Klingon
curses are pretty much unrelated to their homophonous compound words.

~mark



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