tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 12 16:13:20 2001

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Re: suspicious vs. suspect



ghunchu'wI':
: > One prisoner is suspicious.
: 
: taD proposed this sentence as part of a translation exercise. Based 
: on the episode being described, I think it should have been "One 
: prisoner is suspect."  The prisoner is displaying knowledge that she 
: should not have had, making the *Captain* suspicious.

ghunchu'wI' is obviously an (!) hyper-correct speaker, but for taD and many
other anglophones (chiefly Americans?), "suspicious" is indeed a synonym of the
nearly homophonous "suspect".  One of them, in fact, worked on Star Trek:
Continuum's Klingon Linguistic Studies page, and provided the following
"definition" for {pIH} "be suspicious":

  "Quality, to be distrustful. Also, to be the object of such distrust." 

We, however, should assume that Klingons do distinguish {pIH} "be suspicious"
from {nub} "be suspect", at least until Maltz tells us otherwise.  Alas,
neither have been used in canon yet.  

And speaking things suspicious, we also have the suffix {-law'} - which Okrand
says can be translated as "I suspect that" - the verb {voqHa'} "distrust", as
well as the idiom {qagh Sopbe'} "He doesn't eat gagh!":

  "Everyone loves gagh, so if one is not eating it, something must
   be wrong. This expression is used to mean that there is something
   wrong with someone or that someone is acting suspiciously... For
   Klingons... this is a rather mild dismissive remark, not a strong
   insult." (TKW 137)



-- 
Voragh                       
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons



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