tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 29 15:30:51 1996

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Re: how about lutbompu' = opera?

'orqut writes:
>...the word "Opera" is actually a plural (in Latin) for the word "Opus",
>which is a song.  Therefore an opera is actually a story with many songs.

That might be literally what the word means in Latin, but is that what an
opera really "is" to you?  (Are gloves really "hand shoes" to someone who
speaks German?)  It doesn't really make sense to me for us to construct a
word in one language to represent an idea expressed by a word in a second
language by digging into that word's origins in yet a third language.

> So, lutbompu' would seem to be a logical alternative.  Again, literally it
>only means "story-songs" or, with the reverse nature of Klingon,
>"songs-story", which doesn't make much sense, which leads us to bompu'lut!

Whoa!  What's this "reverse nature" you refer to?  English sentences are
generally of the form SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT and simple Klingon sentences are
always OBJECT-VERB-SUBJECT, but there's no general "reversal" involved.
Indeed, a noun-noun combination is translated in the same order as a pair
of English nouns in a possessor-possessed relationship, so {lut bom} would
mean "story's song".

But the interpretation of a coined compound noun is not always the same as
if the two nouns were kept separate.  I would tend to translate {lutbom} as
"story-song", being made of approximately equal parts of story and song but
with the song part emphasized ever so slightly.  It's not really a song's
story, nor is it quite a story's song.  It's both song and story.  Once it
is used as a compound noun, any noun suffixes modify the entire thing, and
not just pieces of it.  If I wanted to refer to a story of many songs, I'd
forego the attempt to compound the words and simply call it {bommey lut}.

By the way, {lutbompu'} is "story-songs (capable of speech)" -- the proper
plural suffix here would be {-mey}, not {-pu'}.

-- ghunchu'wI'

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