tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 22 21:58:22 1999
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Re: KLBC: summer's in, school's out
ja' "Nelson Lamoureux" <[email protected]>
>So, I used the -Hom to clearly indicate that the students I was talking
>about were still rather young.
If you want to indicate clearly that the students are young, calling
them {ghojwI' Qup} is probably better than using the {-Hom} suffix.
>It's interesting to note that klingon gives
>us a tool (basically the -Hom/-'a' suffixes) to make these subtle semantic
>difference on the lexic without changing the basic meaning of a word.
I've always considered that those suffixes *do* change the basic meaning
of a word to some extent. They tend to modify the *word*, not the thing
the word refers to. The Bird of Prey poster does weaken my interpretation
a bit with its translation of {-'a'} as "main" in a few places, and the
idioms about {bo'Daghmey} also can be troublesome to my understanding.
But I'm still going to try to avoid using {-'a'} and {-Hom} as if they
were descriptive terms like {tIn} and {mach}.
>Is there anything that keeps us from doing the following translation:
>
>1- ghojwI'Hom --> elementary or highschool student (ecolier in french)
>
>2- ghojwI' --> student (eleve)
>
>3- ghojwI''a' --> college or university student (etudiant in french)
There is something that keeps *me* from using these words this way.
The distinguising feature between a "student" and a "greater" or a
"lesser" one is not obvious. I myself would tend to think of a
{ghojwI''a'} as referring to a graduate student, and {ghojwI'Hom}
seems to suggest something like sitting in on a class without taking
the tests.
>Even though these notions do not exist in klingon society, the language
>itself gives us tools that can help in the translation of different
>realities across different culture.
Using the augmentive/diminutive suffixes works best when there is an
established "reference meaning" for the root noun. In this particular
case, there is a mismatch for the word "student" between cultures. In
the culture I am part of, a student can be anyone who takes classes,
whether at the kindergarten or postgraduate level.
-- ghunchu'wI'