tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 02 21:39:33 1999
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Re: Love
ja' qa'ral:
>I know I'm flogging a dead sargh but ...
Heghpu'be' Sarghvam. rIQchu' neH.
>/mu'ghom vIgherbogh/, famously unreliable, lists "muSHa' - to love (lit.
>to dis-hate)." Is this a canonic translation or just another "MSN
>thingee"? If the former, perhaps there's a reason.
le'be' mu'vam. motlh. yaj HochHom, 'ach lo'law'ta'be' Okrand.
>No one in the recent /SachtaH Holmaj/ discussion (save perhaps SuStel)
>seemed persuaded by my suggestion that /qamuSHa'/ might be a delightfully
>twisted Klingon equivalent of "I love you," rather than meaning something
>more like "I used to hate you, but don't any more."
ram. ghaytan "I love you" mughlaH <qamuSHa'>. reH lugh'a'? ghobe'.
>As I said then, what intrigued me about /muSHa'/, /parHa'/, /tungHa'/, and
>/Qochbe'/ is their evocation of a culture in which it's more "normal" to
>hate, dislike, discourage and disagree than the reverse.
There's no reason to think the existence of specific roots and not their
opposites indicates that one condition is more "normal" than the other.
English is full of fun examples where an "anti-" term is the common one
and the "root" word is never used for the opposite meaning: disheveled,
unkempt, disgruntled, mistaken, decant, etc.
>The fun is spoiled, as is the pun in /muSHa'/, if these words are no more
>than the literal sum of their roots (dis-hate, not disagree, etc.).
If there's a pun in {muSHa'}, I don't get it. Since the word has never been
used by Okrand, I doubt that any humor value you see in it is intentional.
-- ghunchu'wI'