tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed May 05 12:54:56 2004

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Re: Possible Pun

Steven Boozer ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

Voragh:
> >Are there any other Hawaiian puns in the glossary?

DloraH:
> >> Supghew

Voragh:
> >"... the most commonly found being the relatively small {Supghew}" (KGT 76)
> >is possibly a ukelele-sized instrument, but what's the actual pun?  I lived
> >in Hawaii for three years (where the only ukeleles I ever saw were for
> >tourists) but all I can make from this is "resource/jump bug".

taD:
>According to the wiki
>/wiki/index.php?Puns%20in%20the%20Vocabulary%20of%20tlhIngan%20Hol:
>
>A ukulele is named for the flea-like jumping movement of the player's
>fingers. The Hawaiian word for flea is "'uku lele", or "jumping bug"

Aha!  I had sneaky feeling when I posted that *ukulele* would turn out to 
mean that, but I was too lazy to do the research online.  (Gotta start 
checking the WiKi!)

Sogra'tIS:
> >>>Not having my Hol tomes available, but wasn't "parpar" glossed as a small
> >>>bird?

taD:
>Two birds have the syllable *par* in their name - {cha'par} and {parbIng}.

ghunchu'wI':
>>For what it's worth, Spanish "parpar" means "quack" (the sound made by a
>>duck

Yet another Spanish pun; there are several in the corpus.  Okrand knows 
Spanish well, as most of the source materials for his dissertation on the 
Costanoan Mutsun language (extinct now, but originally spoken in the San 
Francisco Bay area) were in Spanish, who were the first to encounter 
Mutsun-speakers.



-- 
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons

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