[tlhIngan Hol] describing baby animals

[SuStel]

On 10/14/2020 2:48 PM, Will Martin wrote:
> I completely agree with SuStel about “empress”. {voDleH be’} looks 
> like “the emperor’s woman/the woman of the emperor”. {be’ voDleH} 
> looks like “the woman’s emperor/the emperor of the woman”, like maybe 
> women have a different emperor than men do? One is the “man’s emperor” 
> and the other is the “woman’s emperor”?
>
> Klingons don’t have a separate word for female warriors, yet there are 
> obviously female warriors.
>
> Ditto for ambassadors, captains, or any other occupation/rank title.
>
> If you want to stress that an emperor is female, you need to describe 
> it in contextually linked statements. You can’t compress that into a 
> single noun phrase in Klingon by any means I know.
>
> Basically, if you’ve done whatever it takes to be emperor, your sexual 
> gender is less important to people than your rank.
>
> And if the gender of the emperor is really important to you, it 
> becomes important for you to know the emperor very personally, because 
> inappropriate comments or gestures could have undesirable consequences.
>
> If we ever get a female president, she won’t be a *presidentress*. 
> She’ll be a president. This is like that.

No, this is different. /Warrior, ambassador, captain,/ and /president/ 
are all gender-neutral words in English. An /Emperor/ is male and an 
empress is female. When we are given two words for /emperor/ in Klingon, 
it is not automatically the case that those words also mean /empress./

Qa'yIn asked what /I/ would do to translate /empress,/ and that's the 
question I answered. I didn't answer what I think the correct answer is, 
because I don't know. The words might be gender neutral, and Okrand 
simply failed to consider including the feminine translation. There 
might be different words for /empress./ There might be a modification of 
the word for /emperor/ to get /empress. /We have reason to believe that 
political authority is limited by gender in some ways, and we have 
reason to believe that the concept of an empress is not unknown to 
Klingons. We do not know anything about whether Klingons deem the rank 
more important than the gender.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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