tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 03 12:27:18 2010
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RE: Philosophical plurals...
Voragh:
>> DloraH asked Marc Okrand a similar question about {lom} at Praxis Con
>> (May 1998):
>>
>> When someone dies, if you are talking about the "person" they
>> get {-wI'}; and of course if you are referring to the empty shell
>> that is left, it gets a {-wIj}. [DloraH]
>>
>> Thus if one still views corpses as individual "persons" you can use
>> {lompu'} - Terran might well do this - otherwise Klingons use {lommey} to
>> refer to them as empty shells.
Quvar:
>I do not really wish to contradict my admired Master of Ca'non, but here
>I must. We have had this same question quite recently, and we came to
>the result that {-pu'} only works with body-PARTS, not the body itself.
You mean {-Du'}. {-pu'} isn't used with body *parts*.
A better question is: Is a corpse a body part? I see it as the entire body {porgh} or rather, the set of ALL body parts (minus the animating spirit {qa'}).
>So living or not, they are definitely {lommey}.
If you view corpses as body parts then - outside of poetry - definitely not. Okrand writes:
The suffix {-mey} cannot be used with body parts. [TKD 23]
The exception is when they're no longer considered to be body parts:
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.) [st.k 3/23/1998]
--
Voragh
Canon Master of the Klingons