tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 24 13:06:14 2000
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Re: mu' qID subgenres
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: mu' qID subgenres
- Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 16:05:32 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
- Priority: NORMAL
On Wed, 23 Feb 2000 20:49:34 EST [email protected]
wrote:
> you all should watch the movie "PI". It's about a guy looking for a
> peticular multididget number that a group of jews believe to represent the
> name of God. He goes to an elderly mathmatician friend of his to seek
> information and the man gives him this: "If you look hard enough for
> something you will always find it. If you're looking for the number 13, look
> enough and you''ll start to see it all around you. 13 steps from your car to
> your front door, 13 blades of grass in a square inch. It will show up every
> where you look." The point is, if you look hard enough for these puns, you
> will find a way to make almost every word fit. The only way you will ever
> know if these words are actually puns, is to ask M.O. himself.
Okrand VERY rarely confesses any of this. He did slip and
confess that baghneQ/spoon was a Spoonerism and explain
this pun at least once in a relatively public forum, so we
know that one is intentional, and sometimes his
explanations for new words (like rachwI'} really give us
clues that heavily suggest that he is punning, and some of
them, like {DaS/boot} are so blatant that everybody knows
it had to be intentional.
Meanwhile, I'm sure a large percentage of what we have
catalogued as puns are coincidental. I personally doubt,
for example, that {bIghHa'} was meant to be "Big House". I
simply think he likely would have used something that
sounded more like {bIghHuS}. He does make his
transliterations fairly blatant, like {tlhaq}.
And he'll never tell us, so we'll never know. As he has
admitted at least once, he probably doesn't even remember
half of his intentional puns, so even he couldn't really
tell us all the puns he intentionally put in the language.
> Otherwise,
> all these "puns" are just clever ways to remember the vocabulary. The
> teachers of foreign language classes have been suggesting that technique for
> centuries, I'm sure. I did it in spanish class alot. I really don't think
> any of those words were meant to be puns either.
>
> -veS joH
charghwI'