<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 12:50 PM SuStel <<a href="mailto:sustel@trimboli.name">sustel@trimboli.name</a>> wrote:<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<div>On 12/18/2019 12:24 PM, qurgh lungqIj
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite">Klingons
mate. Humans mate too. They might label it "making love", "having
sex", "shagging", "doing it", "making the beast with two backs" or
something else to try to differentiate it from what the rest of
the biological world does, but it's still mating. <br>
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<p>Sure, but what we're interested in is labels, or words. Outside
of a science-fiction context, nobody speaking modern English says
<i>mate</i> to refer to people having sex.</p></div></blockquote><div>I know people who speak modern English and use mate to refer to people having sex outside of sci-fi. You really shouldn't make generalizations about a billion and a half people unless you personally know them all. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<p><b>ngagh</b> and <b>nga'chuq</b> seems to refer to basically the
same sort of act. The question is, do they get more specific?<br></p></div></blockquote><div>Apparently not. <br><br>I believe the difference between the two is that {ngagh} refers to one person doing the act to another person who may or may not be an active (or even willing) participant, while {nga'chuq} refers to two, or more, people performing the act in a joint fashion: "I shagged her" verses "We shagged". This is personal head canon though. </div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><blockquote type="cite">
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<div dir="auto">Or is it primarily used for animals ?<br>
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<div>Humans and Klingons <b>are </b>animals. </div>
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<p>But languages usually distinguish between people and non-people,
and Klingon basically does this in its capable-of-using-language
suffixes and its pronouns. The distinction here may be important
in Klingon. It is in English.<br></p></div></blockquote><div>But often Klingon does the opposite of what languages usually do. If something is important to English, it's probably not important for Klingon. I don't think Klingon uses those suffixes and pronouns to distinguish between "people" and "non-people", but between if the speaker believes that "thing" can, or cannot, communicate with them. Something could consider itself "people" but lack the ability to communicate that to a Klingon speaker, or a Klingon speaker might misunderstand something as being communication when it's not. <br></div><div><br></div><div>qurgh</div></div></div>