[tlhIngan Hol] the {nargh} the other {nargh} and the {-vo'}

[André Müller]

Ah nice, thanks, I had forgotten about that part!

- André

2016-11-22 2:41 GMT+01:00 SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name>:

> On 11/21/2016 7:56 PM, André Müller wrote:
>
> Another idea, unrelated to the syntactic workings of {nargh}: maybe
> they're in fact not 2 distinct homophonic verbs, but one verb with 2 quite
> different translations in English. Escaping and appearing might just be
> different viewpoints of the same action, just like "come" and "go" are both
> {ghoS} or {jaH} and context (often {-vo'} decides how to interpret it.
> Klingon isn't the only language which does that. One of the languages of
> Burma that I am working on (Jinghpaw, pronounced exactly like {jIngpo'} in
> Klingon by the way!) also only has one word "sa" to mean both 'come' and
> 'go'.
>
> So perhaps {nargh} describes the concept of suddenly changing its state of
> presence. One can, sort of, appear to a place, or away from a place. Or a
> thing might suddenly escape from nowhere into sight, and then suddenly
> escape out of your sight again.
>
>
> Okrand himself has floated this suggestion, in *The Klingon Way, *p. 145:
>
> *When a warrior dies, his spirit escapes.*
>
> *HeghDI' SuvwI' nargh SuvwI' qa'*
>
> When a Klingon dies, it is thought that his spirit leaves his body and
> goes to join the spirits of other dead Klingons. This is marked in the
> Klingon Death Ritual when the surviving comrades howl—a warning to the dead
> that a warrior's spirit is on its way. The body, once the spirit has left
> it, is considered a worthless shell and is discarded unceremoniously.
> Exactly what Klingons think the spirit is doing when it leaves the body is
> a little unclear. The verb *"nargh,"* found in the saying cited above,
> means "escape," but the same word, or a phonetically identical one, means
> "appear." Thus, perhaps the Klingons are saying that when a warrior dies,
> his spirit appears, whereas prior to death it was hidden or disguised by
> the body. Another interpretation is that the spirit was held prisoner by
> the body. Worf told Jeremy, whose mother had been killed, "In my tradition,
> we do not grieve the loss of the body. We celebrate the releasing of the
> spirit."
>
> --
> SuStelhttp://trimboli.name
>
>
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