[tlhIngan Hol] lightning lightning bolt and {pe'bIl}

[Will Martin]

Good analysis.

Of course, we feel different about our word “weather” than we feel about the term “atmosphere status”, but since Klingon doesn’t have a word for “weather”, maybe they feel exactly the same about the phrase {muD Dotlh} as we feel about our word “weather”.

I think the real meat you your analysis is that Zeus is not the guy who tells you about the weather, like a meteorologist. Zeus is the guy who can CHANGE the weather. We could list the different things that Zeus can do with the weather, as you suggest, but I’d guess that since Zeus can probably cause lightning, rain, wind, etc. to start, he could also cause them to stop, so even the absence of all the specific kinds of weather we associate with Zeus could be caused by Zeus.

The important thing you’ve pointed out is that Zeus is not one who observes or reports on weather. Zeus causes changes in weather to happen.

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)

> On May 25, 2021, at 8:01 AM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 5/25/2021 7:45 AM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
>> (st.klingon 11/1997):  
>> > Speakers who do this seem to be aware that they are breaking the rules, 
>> > so they are doing it for rhetorical effect. (It has the same sort of feeling, perhaps, 
>> > as if someone were to say in English … “It's lightninging and thundering outside…”)
>> 
>> What is this "this" which speakers do?
> Erroneously think of -moH as being part of the verb stem and saying things like quvmoH'egh he/she honors himself/herself. See the transcript here: klingonska.org/canon/1997-11-30-news.txt <http://klingonska.org/canon/1997-11-30-news.txt>
> 
>> However, I'd like to take this opportunity to say, that one of the things in Klingon I dislike (and when I say dislike, I mean hate), is when multiple meanings are shoved on a single word.
>> 
>> If I say {muD Qun ghaH zeus'e'}, then what do I mean? "Zeus is a god of weather", or "Zeus is a god of the atmosphere"?
> There are two problems here.
> 
> First of all, muD doesn't mean weather. muD means atmosphere, and you can talk about muD Dotlh the status of the atmosphere to refer to what the weather is doing. We don't have a term for the actual weather in Klingon, just status of the atmosphere. So I can say things like muD Dotlh HIja'! Tell me what the weather is like! (Literally, Tell me the atmosphere's status!), but I probably wouldn't say things like muD Dotlh Qun ghaH Zeus'e' Zeus is the god of the atmosphere's status, because what I WANT to say is that he's the god of the rain and wind and lightning and clouds all put together, not the god of the weather report.
> 
> Secondly, you MUST accept that languages give multiple meanings to words. ALL languages do it. I can't demonstrate this in Greek for you, but it's easy in English: I'll pick a word, say high. Dictionary.com lists forty distinct senses of the word. How do you know which sense I mean when I say it? Context. If I say I can jump really high, you know I don't mean high as in sense 16, "rich; extravagant; luxurious" or sense 18, "remote." Or most of the others. You know what I mean, because there's only a limited number of those senses that I could apply to my own jumping.
> 
> 
> 
>> Now, yes, even in natural languages this can happen/happens, but the tools one has in a natural language (vocabulary + grammar) give him ways to make things clear. Let alone the fact, that in natural languages there are so many synonyms for a number of words. So one can simply choose another word/synonym.
>> 
>> Of course, being on this list for almost 6 years, I know/expect that someone will say "context will clarify". But I don't think that a reader is obligated to read an entire paragraph each time the clarification could easily be made, if only we hadn't received a billion different meanings for a single word.
> You don't need to read a whole paragraph to get context. In I jump really high, the context is me jumping. That's enough context to know which kind of high I'm talking about.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
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