tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 30 12:47:49 1997
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Re: KLBC: insulting
>Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 23:31:34 -0800 (PST)
>From: "Jarno Peschier" <[email protected]>
>
>On 19 Nov 97 at 10:03, William H. Martin wrote:
>
>> I REALLY wish people would stop trying to make sense out of the
>> pieces of Klingon words. I mean, what does "restaurant" have to do
>> with "rest"ing or "rant"ing? And what does a "tower" have to do with
>> debt? It does have the word "owe" in it, after all.
>>
>> Care to explain the etymology which brought the words "fat" and
>> "her" together to form the word "father"? One supposes it would be a
>> similar explanation for a similar word beginning with the word
>> "mat".
>>
>> And is the root word for disheveled "sheveled" or "heveled"? I
>> don't really remember either one used very frequently without
>> the prefix.
>
>In nearly all of these cases you "cut up" currently existing words
>at other boundaries than between syllables, which is "stupid" indeed.
>That's not really how words form (I think).
But how do you know that Klingon epithets divide where you say they do?
That might be just as stupid. "Restaurant" *was* being divided at
syllables, and as it happens, "disheveled" really DOES divide into dis-
plus "*heveled", where the latter is a form of "habille" from the French,
signifying clothing. But that doesn't mean "*heveled" is a word.
What about the wonderful insight we have into Terran societ in the
following word: I bet you didn't know English-speakers were nocturnal. But
the surely were. Look at the word "delight". Such a positive-connotation
word associated with making things darker ("de-light" removing light, just
as "de-fragment" is removing fragments or such). That's OBVIOUSLY the
origin, and look what we learned about English-speaking society! Or
rather, that's what you would think, if you followed the same resoning with
English derivations that I see people trying on Klingon words. Words can
be old, old things, with origins lost in the mists of time, in extinct or
foreign languages, etc etc. And this holds not just true, or doubly true,
but probably triply true (at least 2.5 times true) for swear words. Just
*try* to trace the origin of "shit"! Not that it can't be done, but it
goes awfully far back, and doesn't necessarily relate to anything else in
English (and what is its past tense? shat?)
~mark