tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 13 12:51:53 1997
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Re: Word Origin Speculation II
- From: "Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Word Origin Speculation II
- Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 15:59:36 -0500
- Organization: http://www.kli.org
Lots of different folks at different levels:
> > >tIq = heart (ticker),
> >
> > That I've seen too...
>
> Yes, hearts and clocks are similar in that they go {tIq-tlhaq} ...
Curious. I always remember <<chop>> because of the slang term "choppers"
meaning teeth. Klingon allows us to generate the same kind of usage with
<<chopwI'>>.
Ivan wrote:
> See, Mark, he's speculating about what actually derives from where,
> not looking for mnemonics (which by definition rest on coincidences).
Not commenting on the main thrust of your remark, but I don't know what
definition *you* are working from but (putting my academic hat on for a
moment) coincidence has nothing to do with how mnemonics function, or
how they're created. At least, not in the cognitive psychology
literature.
> For the curious: {wa'} looks very much like the Ancient Egyptian
> <w`> `one', and {maH} is practically identical to the Ossetic word
> for `we'.
And this is probably as good an illustration of the dangers of reading
into random pairs as anything else. When you consider that there are
thousands of languages out there, working with a very finite set of
speech sounds, it's no surprise when a word in Klingon matches nicely
with a word in language X. But even in the world of artificial
language, probability theory will tell us that there will more
unintentional matches than deliberate ones. Add in a bit of creative
(or liberal) semantic grease to make the fit a bit easier, and you up
that by several orders of magnitude.
I'm always reminded of the linguist who tried to make a case for
Comanche being related to English on the basis of the Comanche word for
food "tuku" and a southwestern Texas dialect slang term, "tucker."
It takes all kinds.
Lawrence
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