[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: De' QulwI'

[Steven Boozer]

Indeed.  See also from qepHom 2016:

  postal service             QIn tum
  post office (building)     QIn tum qach

The {QIn tum} has thousands of branches, sometimes dozens in the same city, but one over-arching agency or bureaucracy.  It seems obvious that {QIn tum qach} refers to a specific building.  Why are people confused by this?

> a private library would probably be just one building, and
> thus wouldn't need a separate "agency".

Depends on what exactly a {tum} is.  Does it refer to only government {qum} agencies or any kind of administration {loH}?  Here at the University of Chicago Library (where I work) consists of several specialized library buildings scattered over the south side of Chicago, but one central organization housed in the largest of them.

--Voragh


DloraH:
> In the cities I've lived in, the public library system had more than one
> building.  There were several paq nojwI' qach scattered around the city.
> I think paq nojwI' tum refers to that overall collection of buildings that
> work together to make up the "Public Library" that most cities have.
> I think he included "public" in parentheses because I'm think a private
> library would probably be just one building, and thus wouldn't need a
> separate "agency".
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2016-12-29 at 18:49 +0000, Terrence Donnelly wrote:
>
> > To me, the {paq nojwI' qach} is the literal building housing the books
> and the staff, while the {tum} refers to the entity more abstractly. If
> you said, "I'll check the Library and see if they have that" and you used
> your phone app or the on-line catalog, it would be the {tum} you are
> accessing, but not the {qach}. If you are talking about visiting the
> library, I don't see much difference. I also don't see how {tum} implies
> "public", but that's how it's glossed, so be it.
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 9:30 AM, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu>
> wrote:
> > > Also from qepHom 2016:
> > >
> > >   paq nojwI' qach       library (building) (n)
> > >   paq nojwI' tum         library (public) (n)
> >
> > Do we know what the difference between libraries is?
> >
> > --
> > ~Michael Roney, Jr.