tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 17 13:35:47 2001
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Re: body parts?
Marc Ruehlaender wrote:
: The question has come up whether things like {'aD}, {Somraw}, etc.
: etc. are body parts in the sense that they take the plural in {-Du'}.
Yes, they do. Countable body parts take {-Du'}, even if they come from several
different bodies:
Soch QuchDu'
seven foreheads CK
chorgh QuchDu' 'IH
eight beautiful foreheads CK
qIp'egh nachDu'chaj tlhIngan SuvwI'pu'.
Klingon warriors are butting heads. PK
targhlIj yab tIn law' no'lIj Hoch yabDu' tIn puS.
Your targ has a bigger brain than all your ancestors put together. PK
: Also do {pob} and {jIb} refer to single strands of hair or are
: they "mass" nouns as in English? If they are countable, are they
: body parts? Any canon, please?
pob "hair on body"
[not attested in canon]
jIb "hair on head"
DaH jIbwIj vISay'nISmoH.
I must wash my hair now. PK
{jIb} seems to be a mass noun here -- it's unlikely s/he's talking about
washing a single hair!
I suppose it helps to consider them uncountable mass nouns like {veD} "fur" or
even {quHvaj} "dandruff".
Just to muddy the waters, here's a post Okrand made to startrek.klingon
(3/23/98) on which plural suffix to use with {DIr} "skin" after it has been
removed from the body, tanned and used as leather:
"Since number is an optional category in Klingon (the plural suffix
may be left off even if the word refers to more than one thing),
{DIr} may refer to a skin or skins or skin as a material or substance.
Likewise for {veDDIr} 'pelt, pelts'. So the problem of which plural
suffix to use comes up only when one feels the need to be very
specific. If I understand Maltz correctly, it works like this: The
general plural suffix {-mey} is not used with body parts (except by
poets, of course). Thus {DIrmey} 'skins' and {veDDIrmey} 'pelts' are
not (or, perhaps better, are no longer) body parts, but rather are
materials from which things (clothing or blankets, for example) may
be made. They've lost their association with the creatures that
originally had them. (This is kind of like the distinction in English
between beef, which is eaten, and cattle, which isn't.) If there still
is that association, that is, if the creatures still have their skin,
or if it's a creature that has multiple skins (maybe layers, maybe
different kinds of skin on different parts of the body), or if the
skin just came off either by natural causes (as with Alan Anderson's
snakes) or by the creatures being, well, skinned, then the body-part
plural suffix {-Du'} may be used: {DIrDu'}. But {DIr} alone, without
a suffix, is heard most often."
Using Okrand's suggestion WRT {DIr}, you can generally just use the noun
without any suffix and avoid the problem altogether:
jabwI'! chatlhwIjDaq jIb tu'lu'.
Waiter! There's (a) hair in my soup.
But I suppose if you really *must* refer to a single strand of hair, use
{SIrgh}:
"Each string is a {SIrgh}, a word also used for any thread or
filament. A {SIrgh} of the finest quality is made from a material
secreted by insects, similar to the silk produced by silkworms."
(KGT p.76)
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons