tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 11 18:47:16 1999
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Genderless Klingons?
ja' qa'ral:
>tlhIngan Hol seems to be genderless to an extent unusual for Terran (or at
>least Indo-European) languages. Do any nouns other than <be'>, <be'Hom>,
><be'nal>, <be'nI>, <SoS> and <SoSnI'> necessarily refer to females? Are
>there other words like <'IH> (beautiful/handsome) and <joH> (lord/lady) that
>do double duty by comparison with English?
Almost all of them. :) There's no separate word for "empress", for example,
and {pIn'a'} "master" can work for at least some meanings of "mistress". :-)
You missed pointing out that there are no neutral Klingon nouns for "parent"
or "sibling", however. The mismatch in concepts is one of the fun things
about learning a language like Klingon. You are aware of the two verbs {Saw}
and {nay}, right? That's a distinction that English lacks, leading to such
phrases as "take (someone) as a wife".
-- ghunchu'wI'