tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Sep 23 09:21:07 1994
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KLBC: A suggestion for 'inside'
- From: [email protected] (George Aaron Broadwell)
- Subject: KLBC: A suggestion for 'inside'
- Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 12:16:28 -0400
Some recent posts have pointed out the lack of an obvious word for 'inside'
in thlIgan Hol. After giving the matter a bit of thought, I have a
suggestion for how we might do this.
Okrand writes "Prepositional concepts such as 'above' and 'below' are
actually nouns in Klingon, best translated "area above," "area below," etc.
The locative suffix ... follows the second noun." (TKD p. 31)
The situation that he is describing is a very common one in Terran
languages. In most American Indian and West African languages that I've
seen there is the same use of nouns to express prepositional concepts. In
languages like Zapotec and Yoruba, these nouns often coincide with names of
body parts, so that "inside the house" is said as "at the belly of the house".
Now, we happen to have a convenient word for "belly" in thlIngan Hol, chor.
So I suggest that we might express a phrase like "inside the garbage scow" as
veQDuj chorDaq
[Analysis: veQ-Duj chor-Daq
garbage-ship belly-locative (5)]
What do others think?
P.S. The dashes in the analysis portion above are a linguists convention
for discussing the morphology of complex examples. Each thlIngan Hol
morpheme is translated by the English below it.
George Aaron Broadwell, [email protected]
Anthropology; Linguistics and Cognitive Science, SUNY-Albany, Albany, NY 12222
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"Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible" -- Anthony
Hope