[tlhIngan Hol] expressing goddess

Steven Boozer sboozer at uchicago.edu
Wed Apr 14 08:17:39 PDT 2021


*gin’tak* may be the male equivalent of {ghojmoq}:  an advisor so trusted he has been made part of the family. He wears a special ring, bearing the crest of the House he has pledged his life to defend.  We’ve seen one, maybe two of them:

Worf said "K'mtar is *gin'tak* to the House of Mogh". [TNG "Firstborn"]  Worf recognized his ring but K’mtar was actually being impersonated by future Alexander, who had time-travelled into the past to warn his father and his younger self about the dangers of ignoring young Alexander’s Klingon training.
  The elderly retainer Tumek may have been *gin'tak* to the House of Kozak. He continued to work for his widow, Grilka. (DS9 "House of Quark" and "Looking For *par'Mach* In All the Wrong Places")
Again, De’vID’s caveats apply here as well, as they may only have happened to be male for dramatic reasons.  AFAIK Okrand has never provided an official spelling, but see {ghIntaq} “battle spear” which may well be a metaphor for the person.

--
Voragh.
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From: tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol-bounces at lists.kli.org> On Behalf Of De'vID
On Tue, 13 Apr 2021 at 22:51, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name<mailto:sustel at trimboli.name>> wrote:
On 4/13/2021 4:41 PM, Will Martin wrote:
Do we have any sex-gendered nouns besides mother, father, and other blood relatives or spouses? Even then, Okrand slid in some odd ones, like {tey’}, which basically means “a not-gender-specific child of a same-gender sibling of one of your parents”.

If there are no non-blood-relative-or-spouse sex-gender-specific nouns, then the definitions are likely generally mail as a simple style point in Okrand’s writing, like saying, “A person must trust his instincts,” instead of “her instincts” or “his or her instincts” or “their instincts”. It’s just the way he writes them, by default.

We have ghojmoq nurse, nanny, governess, which does not appear to have a male version. Again, it's the English translation that is gendered; we don't know about the Klingon word.
Again, this was a case of necessity. The word was made up by TNG writers for the episode "Sins of the Father". In the script, the word was written "ghojmoK" (sic), and was spoken by Worf to refer to Kahlest: "She was my ghojmoK... my nurse." I'm pretty sure the writers looked up various words related to an adult who takes care of a child in TKD, came up {ghojmoH} "teach, instruct", and either deliberately or by accident changed the ending to make up a new word, which Dr. Okrand then retroactively made official by adding it to the Appendix. It's literally been used once to refer to a specific character who happened to be female, so we can't infer if it can or cannot refer to a male caretaker of a young child.
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