tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 20 06:19:58 1995
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Re: jabbI'IDwIj wa'DIch
On Mon, 20 Nov 1995, Christoph Pfisterer wrote:
> Hi everyone!
Welcome to our world!
> I'm new to this list, so I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Christoph
> Pfisterer and I'm from Dresden, Germany. I chose my Klingon name to be
> "bIQHurgh", translatable as "dark water".
Well, names are a funny business. If you say your name is /bIQHurgh/ and
it means "dark water", then I really can't argue with you. But
/bIQHurgh/ does *not* mean "dark water", it doesn't mean anything. It's
a noun and a verb stuck together, and our grammar doesn't give us a rule
for this type of combination. "Dark Water" would be /bIQ Hurgh/, with
/Hurgh/ acting adjectivally.
Names, however, do not appear to be constrained to rules or grammar or
phonology, as r'Hul can tell you. {{;) (Say, r'Hul, do you have my
disruptor? juHlIjDaq vIlIjlaw'pu'!)
> I've written yet another a "translation" (just does the looking up for you,
> actually) program. It's called pojwI'
Not that I have a copyright or anything, but *my* translator is called
/pojwI'/, and it's been around since 1992. Down this path confusion lies.
> I've also got a question: is it common practice to create compound nouns on
> your own, or are we limited to the noun-noun construction? Well, the
> question actually turns out to be >should I make my program recognize
> "newly formed" compound nouns?<
The grammar gives us a general, productive rule for combining nouns. My
name, for instance, is a compound that is not in the dictionary:
/Holtej/. You might also see it used to refer to linguists in general,
and not me in particular.
If we stick strictly to the grammar, then you have lots of constructions
that you have to account for with compound nouns. Each of the nouns can
have their own suffixes. Each could be a verb, with verb suffixes, and
either /-wI'/ or /-ghach/, and then any number of noun suffixes. In
practice, you almost never see compounds of this type, because they tend
to be difficult to understand (it may be obvious to *you* what it means,
but to others it's not evident). ~mark fondly calls these "hindsight"
words; they make sense only if you know a priori what they're supposed to
mean.
So, the short answer is "yes".
> bIQHurgh
--Holtej