tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 23 11:59:33 1997
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Cursing
- From: Terrence Donnelly <[email protected]>
- Subject: Cursing
- Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 13:57:21 -0500
I just realized that there's a whole area of Klingon vocabulary for which
we have no words at all! I'm referring to adjectives you can use for
cursing. True, we have epithets (basically, names you can call someone),
and interjections (words that express your attitude to a situation), but
no verbs we can use to modify a single noun to express our feelings about
it. Given Klingons' famed cursing skills, this seems an odd lack.
Granted, we have {qay'}, which might be such a verb, as in {Human qay' yIHoH}
"Kill the troublesome human!". But this seems like a pretty weak curse:
"troublesome". Probably {qay'} is just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaking of which, I also think {jay'} is only the tip of the iceberg, that
there are probably lots of intensifiers in Klingon. These would express
finer shaded of meaning, eg. "intensity with a positive/surprised overtone",
"intensity mixed with disgust", "intensity mixed with dismay", etc. The
intensifier {jay'} and the verb {qay'} are probably just the most generic
and blandest representatives of their kind.
-- ter'eS
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/2711