At 13:47 04/11/2011, lab SuStel:
On 11/4/2011 4:33 PM, Qov wrote:bicycle - qam Do DujFavourite new word from the whole disk. Because I ride a bicycle more often than a puH Duj, because it's a simple translation of velocipede, and because it doesn't confirm or deny whether Klingons have bicycles. I'd think if you can build a warp drive you can build such an astonishingly efficient energy conversion device, but perhaps they never had good enough roads to trigger the invention.I sometimes wonder if, in the long transition from no' Hol to various ta' Hol, whether words for technology that was no longer in use failed to make the transition. There may be no' Hol terms for airplanes, bicycles, trains, and so forth that have nothing to do with Duj (or the no' Hol word Do'), but the terms for them were simply forgotten. Klingons may not be so attached to old words as we are, and jettison them without concern.
My current theory on the matter is that in the earliest reaches of no' Hol the word meant "travois" or "raft" or whatever it was that Klingons first devised to assist in transportation. As transportation was adapted to new media and new technologies, they used the same word and described it if necessary to disambiguate. So whatever the dominant means of transportation is at a time and place is the Duj and the others get qualifiers. Once upon a time, and probably still to someone who unlike malth does not live in a spaceship, that was a logh Duj. They would have to forget old meanings of words pretty quickly considering how much of the CVC space is occupied by current vocabulary. (I would love to see some pretty graphs on the subject, overall and broken down per vowel and consonant!)
- Qov
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