tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jul 24 02:04:09 2001
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Re: Those ever-lovable plural noun suffixes.
- From: Andrew <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Those ever-lovable plural noun suffixes.
- Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 01:59:26 -0400 (EDT)
>If -Du' is affixed to an otherwise regular -mey noun, could it be
>interpreted as meaning a body part, if such an interpretation would make
>sense? For example, could 'ay'Du' be considered as something like "body
>parts", or would I just get confused stares from the Klingons in the
This is a strange set of cases. I remember some rare instances where people
did this and it felt natural, for example, sometime back in the day, we
liked the term nuHDu'. I usually saw it as "fighting fists" but it could
feasibly be any fighting extremity.
>Just out of curiosity, *is* there a word for "body part"? {porgh 'ay'}?
>{mojaq <-Du'> ghajnISbogh Doch}?
Yes, we always used to say porgh 'ay'. I *supposed* -Du' would be in order
when taking the plural. I don't know what MO would say (but he ain't here,
is he? :)
An interesting aside: As the marked use of -mey connotes "scattered all
about", I often felt that -pu' and -Du' have a default connotation of
organizedness. "porgh 'ay'mey" almost seems marked, like you had to be
talking about dismembered corpses on a battlefield.
>2. Would Data, and his brother Lore, use -mey or -pu'? Talking computers,
>like the Enterprise's, get -mey, but it seems that Data and Lore would
A good lesson for plural suffixes is don't overthink it. Because Data and
Lore walk, talk, and behave very much like sentient beings, qoqpu' seems the
best term. But the less humanoid the robot is, the less inclined I would be
to use -pu', tending instead toward -mey. So clunky, R2D2-type robots would
always warrant -mey, but HAL 9000 and his similars might just deserve a
-pu'. It's a very fuzzy line between them. Sometimes either one is
appropriate, and it depends on how much of a social relationship you have to
the thing in question, e.g. babies, pets, chatterbots. The distinction is
fuzzy even in English. If I got stuck on a deserted island and had only the
trees to keep me company, you can bet I would eventually start calling them
Sorpu'. Well, the Klingon ones, anyways.
>On a somewhat unrelated note, I noticed that Klingon nouns and pronouns have
>two different sets of grammatical gender: Nouns have three genders; language
>speakers, body parts, and everything else (neuter, perhaps), while pronouns
>only have a speaking/nonspeaking distinction. Perhaps at some point in the
>history of the Klingon language, there were likewise three genders of
>pronouns, like with nouns, but the body part and neuter genders got mixed
>together.
ghaytan, ghaytan.
I have only returned to this list as of a short time ago after a long
hiatus, and it seems many of the people who used to be very active are now
dormant/lurking. That's the way things go. I would love to hear from some of
them. It's interesting to see how we debate things, especially when it's how
to say certain things, like "body part". There are a lot of tools in
tlhIngan Hol that still go unused, including a lot of vocabulary. Altho I'm
grateful for the work that Okrand puts into the language now, there is
something to be said for group concensus. After all, cha' yab qaq law', wa'
yab qaq puS, to quote a Terran. I'm 24 years old, and I've been studying
Klingon off and on for almost half my life. It's really starting to make a
little sense to me now. ;)
--Andrew Strader
"How are you gentlemen? All your base are belong to us."
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~strader