[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: romuluSngan

[Will Martin]

I think the more global issue here is that we can’t rely too much on controlling the scope of meaning of specific words and phrases. Sometimes, we want a phrase to be very specific. Sometimes we want it to mean more than it usually means.

We accomplish that higher degree of broad scope or specificity with larger units of grammar. In school they tell us that a sentence is “a complete thought”. That’s not entirely true or clear, but leaning too hard on something less than a sentence can have disappointing results. Context is really important.

Too often, I get frustrated with the desire to have a phrase with no context either mean a very specific thing (when it can mean multiple things in different contexts) or mean something broader than the most common meaning, again, with no context.

I think it works better if we write a phrase in a sentence or a sentence in a paragraph in order to craft the environment within which the phrase takes on greater confidence in expressing a particular meaning because of the foundation of the context.

> On Nov 12, 2021, at 4:41 PM, luis.chaparro at web.de wrote:
> 
> Voragh:
> 
>> Sounds fine to me, but keep in mind that phrases like {'eSpanya'ngan(pu') Huch} also mean "the Spaniard's (or Spaniards') money" -- ie. a specific one or group. As usual, context is everything.
> 
> Yes, I know, thank you for your help!
> 
> Me:
> 
>> since speaking about *origin* is something we can usually do referring to the place or to the people who live in this place (of course, there were Spaniards who didn't live in Spain and used other currencies, but in a normal conversation and given the correct context, such an identification shouldn't be problematic, and I hope that's so for Klingons too).
> 
> Just for the completeness of the idea: *Origin* can mean place, person or source from which something comes. Sometimes the persons from whom something comes or originates are the people living in a place (considered as a whole or society), so saying that something has its origin in the inhabitants of a place is more or less the same as saying that it has its origin in that place (like, I think, when we speak about currency or cuisine or art or history). However, I guess that if I want to speak in Klingon about the *Spanish vegetation*, i.e., if I want to indicate the origin of that vegetation, only naming the place from which it comes, *'eSpanya' tI* (*the vegetation of Spain*), would make sense. Saying something like *'eSpanya'ngan tI* (*the vegetation of the Spaniards*) would sound strange to me, since the inhabitants are not the origin or the creators of the country's vegetation (nor are they otherwise its possessors).
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org