tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Oct 17 20:19:51 2001
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Re: KLBC: Turning a verb into a noun
From: "Rohan Fenwick" <[email protected]>
> jatlh Voragh:
>
> >I tend to consider {-ghach}ed nouns to be the Klingon equivalent of
fancy,
> >pedantic/scholarly, $10 words in English. I.e. if you want to translate
> >something like "antidisestablishmentarianism", {-ghach} is ideal.
>
> If we want to use terms that are intended to be purely technical
> (translations of linguistic terms come immediately to mind - we can't
> discuss too much of that in pure Klingon) then would it be proper to use
> {-ghach} simply to mark that they ARE technical terms? For example,
instead
> of <<tlhuHqa'ghach>> (hypothetically) meaning "*resuming-breathing-ness"
or
> some other translation, it could mean "aspiration" (linguistically): the
> quality of resuming breathing (?)
No. /-ghach/ has nothing to do with being a technical term. verb+ghach is
a marked noun, and verb+suffix+ghach is just a noun. /quvHa'ghach/
"dishonor" is not a technical term. /tlhuHqa'ghach/ would mean "the
resumption of breathing." That's not technical; it's just what it says it
is. There's no grammatical way to indicate that something is a technical
term.
I suggest you stick your fingers in the air and say "laser."
SuStel
Stardate 1796.2