tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Feb 21 15:43:05 2000
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Word origins
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Word origins
- Date: 21 Feb 2000 23:39:24 -0000
I'm still not really here, only reading the list with half an eye, but I
thought I might warn you folks looking for meaning in the Klingon lexicon:
it is a safe bet you will find it *whether or not* it is there. That is,
while we know that Okrand does make such puns, it doesn't necessarily
follow that the ones you find are intended, even subconsciously. Given the
range of possible puns (from all the languages Okrand is presumed to know,
even just from English) and all the possibilities even in a single area (TV
shows, movies), the odds of several *dozen* of these puns happening purely
BY CHANCE is very high.
Check out
http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm
for a nice treatment of the related case of finding apparently similar
words in possibly unrelated languages. The results are pretty directly
applicable to our case as well.
Oh, and as for reversals for puns, what about megh/ghem and pogh/ghop?
Admittedly a different sort of wordplay...
~mark