[tlhIngan Hol] expressing baby animals

mayqel qunen'oS mihkoun at gmail.com
Mon Nov 29 05:46:53 PST 2021


lieven:
> For my translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I talked to Marc
> Okrand exactly on this. He agreed that {targh ghu} is okay for "Targ
> puppy" or "baby targ". This also confirmed that an animal baby can use
> the word {ghu}.
> Okrand added:
> "Right. Or {targh Qup} for a somewhat older targ."
> So you may consider this as "canon", and it answers your question.

Cool! So now we can talk as much as we want about soft, cute, and
silly baby animals, and in Ca'Non way too! Thanks for sharing.

But before moving on there's something I'd like to make certain.

jIH:
> {vIghro'-ghu}
SuStel:
> In English, the hyphen used this way represents a genitive relationship
SuStel:
> Oh, hunter-killer isn't genitive. That's a different kind of relationship.

Initially, I couldn't understand when a noun-noun construction is to
be interpreted as a genitive relationship, and when as something else.
So I thought of the following:

When a noun-noun construction makes sense if one read it as "noun 2 of
noun 1" then it represents a genitive relationship, but when reading
it as "noun 2 of noun 1" doesn't make sense then it's something else.

So, the {vIghro' ghu} is genitive since it makes sense for it to be
read as "baby of a cat", but the "hunter-killer" is something else
since it makes no sense understanding it as "killer of the hunter".

Would you agree with this approach?

-- 
Dana'an
https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/
Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ



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