tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 08 21:41:55 1998
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Re: A Matter of Honor
ja'pu' qoror:
>Hmm... in the novelization of "All Good Things", Worf was thinking at one
>point that it was rather strange that Klingon only had one word for honor,
>{batlh}, which could mean everything from honorable conduct of a judge to
>honor between friends, while Eskimo had so many words for "snow."
>...
>This is wrong of course, but perhaps there is some type of distinction
>along those lines between {batlh} and {quv}.
ja' Voragh:
>OTOH, Worf may have simply been wrong in the novel.
Worf was doubly wrong. I've heard the "Eskimo snow words" claim quite a
number of times, and I've *never* seen a list of such words. I've got to
wonder whether there really are that many Eskimo words for snow, and even
if there are, whether having that many words for snow is remarkable. Even
in English, it's easy to come up with a lot of snow-related words:
snow flurry whiteout drift blizzard flakes powder slush dusting pack
avalanch snowbank snowfall snowstorm snowsquall
...plus a large number of other compound words having the syllable "snow",
and a few slightly less related terms like sleet, hail, and igloo. :-)
Worf was raised among Humans, and apparently fell victim to *two* linguistic
myths: Eskimo has an unusually large number of snow words, and Klingon has
an unusually small number of honor words. Note that the example concepts of
"honorable conduct of a judge" and "honor between friends" themselves don't
use particularly distinct words for "honor" even in English.
-- ghunchu'wI'