tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 25 03:01:36 1994
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Re: Grist for the mill..
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>Date: Wed, 24 Aug 94 12:57:19 EDT
>According to [email protected]:
>>
>...
>> It's funny: In Guido#1 and Nick's "Hamlet," the word used for empress
>> is {ta'be'nal}. But, in fact, the Claudius is the King only by virtue
>> of his relationship to the Queen. In a sense, he's {ta'be'nalloDnal},
>> if you care to extend the analogy. Just a bit of irony, my comments
>> are not to be taken seriously.
>>
>> --Holtej
>I suspect that she would just be called {ta'} with no reference
>to gender. If you HAD to make such a reference, I'd build the
>compound {be'ta'}. I know that ~mark might interpret that as
>"empiror of women" or "women's empiror", but the other gender
>related terms all have {be'} as their first syllable, not last.
Not so; are you forgetting "puqbe'"/daughter? The other terms have "be'"
as the first syllable because they're not (so far as we can tell)
compounds. They are words usually with inscrutable etymologies, but which
we may presume are modifications on "be'", NOT compounds. "be'Hom" is
analyzable as noun+suffix. "be'nal" doesn't analyze given our current
knowledge; you can hardly draw generalities from it! Same with "be'nI'"
unless it really does come from "long female" with some sort of bizarre
idiomatic meaning lost in the mists of time, in which case it's just a
noun+adjectival verb.
"be'ta'", as a compound, seems to me to be the wrong way around. True,
"pubbe'" does seem to open the door for parallel (appositive) compounds (in
which the two elements *both* describe the thing equally instead of
modifying each other), but even there, note that "be'" is last, not first.
I suppose it might work your way 'round (cf. "Emperor woman" in English,
vs. "Woman Emperor"), but I'm not quite prepared to accept it without
anything to go on yet.
>I would also not want to be the person who made a pun on the
>empiress "not accomplishing" anything...
Hey, languages do that... :-)
>charghwI'
~mark