tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Sep 23 14:56:29 1994

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Re: KLBC: A suggestion for 'inside'



>From: [email protected] (George Aaron Broadwell)
>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.

>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)]


or "burgh", I suppose?  Um, I don't really like it.  It's an awfully
language-specific and idiomatic.  While it's good to see how other
languages handle things, somehow this copying of idiom bothers me more than
others I've seen.  Why "belly"?  Why not "burgh"?  In English we might use
"heart" more often, maybe "tIq" (I doubt it).  Maybe "Hom"/bone (in Hebrew
and Aramaic, inflected forms of "bone" are used to means
"myself"/"yourself"/etc, but I wouldn't recommend that in English of
Klingon).  Sorry.  It doesn't really work for me.  I could see Okrand
okaying one particular one of these, say, but somehow I'd expect him to
give us another word or something.

~mark



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