tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Aug 09 07:58:54 1997

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Re: Cursing



At 11:48 PM 8/7/97 -0700, ghunchu'wI' wrote:
>[regarding a lack of words useful for cursing]
>
>ja' ter'eS:
>>You misunderstand me; I guess I phrased that badly.  I'm referring to
>>descriptive verbs used _primarily_ as curses.
>
>You're grasping for something in Klingon that apparently exists in the
>English that you use, and you're just not going to find it the way you
>are asking for it. 

I accept the usefulness of all the alternatives to "verbs of cursing"
you mentioned, but none of them rule out their possible existence.  It's 
not that big a deal; I was only commenting on what I thought was a 
surprising lacuna in the vocabulary.

I still think such verbs could exist and if the Klingons were a real
people, I'd expect to eventually discover some.  However, this is all
academic.  The only person who could "discover" such words is Marc Okrand.
If he came right out and said someday "There are no descriptive verbs used
solely for cursing", then of course the issue would be settled. Absent
that, the _lack_ of such verbs is not proof of their non-existence, 
since you can't "prove" a negative in this way.  All I can say is that
for me, the jury is still out, but that it doesn't make any difference
to my day-to-day use of Klingon, anyway.

-- ter'eS

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/2711



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