tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 15 11:52:47 2000
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Weighing in on Du'
- From: "Roger Robinson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Weighing in on Du'
- Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 19:51:14 -0000
- Disposition-Notification-To: "Roger Robinson" <[email protected]>
I suspect people are looking for logic where it should not exist. If
Klingon is a living language, spoken by millions of people over
centuries, it will have irregularities and illogicalities. We shouldn’t
imagine irregularities where we don't have canonical examples, but
where we have, we should accept them as natural. There are
genuine canonical examples of Du' being used for the body parts of
non-living beings, for example
KGT 97 "... characterised by its V-shaped handles, termed DeSqivDu'
("elbows; note that Du' the plural suffix for body parts is used here
even though the handles are not literally body parts)."
And there are the stuffed to’baj legs.
What the quote from KGT suggests (without confirming absolutely) is
that this use of ‘Du’ for elbows is an irregularity, specific to
nevDaghmey, because one would expect Okrand to tell us
specifically that where body parts are used to refer to inanimate
objects, -Du’ is used, if that were the case. But if Malth came along
and gave a definitive description either way, in my view it would be
consistent with the DesqivDu’ passage.
The trouble is we are in the dark. We don’t even know that Klingons
actually use a body part word for the supports of furniture, let along
that it is “leg”, just as Klingons describe those handles on pots as
elbows, and in English we don’t (though we might use “arms” or
“ears”).
So I don’t think we can be dogmatic here. As long as an individual’s
usage is consistent to themselves, I don’t think we have enough
material to determine. My personal view is that KGT tends towards
DesqivDu’ being specific to pots, and it is a slightly less radical
interpretation, but as I say, it could be interpreted the other way.
Isn’t this the whole difficulty with the enterprise – as soon as people
actually start speaking an artificial language, it starts to grow in
unpredictable ways, even if its founders don’t want it to. We have
British English, American English, Australian English, Zimbabwean
English, etc, etc – in the same way we are inevitably developing
Earth Klingon, however hard we try to keep to the pure language of
the mother planet.
naQSej