[tlhIngan Hol] Words from The Little Prince

De'vID de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com
Tue Jan 1 07:24:30 PST 2019


On Tue, Jan 1, 2019, 14:51 mayqel qunenoS <mihkoun at gmail.com wrote:

> maltz:
> > A male sheep, that is, a ram, is called DI'raq loD. It's two words.
> > Kin terms (like puqloD and lorloD) are set terms, regular vocabulary
> items.
> SuStel:
> > And there we go.
> lieven:
> > There's again the situation where Okrand made a small mistake. So here
> > we must just say that language is natural, it's not math :-)
> > (Or Maltz needs to correct one of both.)
>
> I don't understand; Where's the problem ? What's the mistake ?
>

You've somehow messed up the quoted thread.

Lieven was not replying to SuStel, but to me. In response to the revelation
from Maltz which stated that Klingon doesn't have separate words for males
and females of the same animal (which you've only partially quoted above),
I wrote: {qItbe'}. This both means "Impossible!" and is the word for a
specific female animal (i.e., I jokingly refuted the claim by providing a
canon counterexample). That's what Lieven was replying to.

Klingons consider {DI'raq loD} and {DI'raq be'} to be noun-noun
constructions, but {qItbe'} (and {qItloD}) had previously been written as
single words. But Okrand has sometimes been inconsistent in putting spaces
in constructions like {DIvI'may'Duj}, and the Latin transcription we use to
write Klingon isn't how natives write Klingon, so this isn't really a
mistake in the Klingon language itself so much as a minor inconsistency in
the use of spaces in how some words have been transcribed.

-- 
De'vID

>
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