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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/14/2020 2:48 PM, Will Martin
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:25F2434C-D226-4509-8615-68192FD4088E@mac.com">
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<div class="">I completely agree with SuStel about “empress”.
{voDleH be’} looks like “the emperor’s woman/the woman of the
emperor”. {be’ voDleH} looks like “the woman’s emperor/the
emperor of the woman”, like maybe women have a different emperor
than men do? One is the “man’s emperor” and the other is the
“woman’s emperor”?</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Klingons don’t have a separate word for female
warriors, yet there are obviously female warriors.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Ditto for ambassadors, captains, or any other
occupation/rank title.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">If you want to stress that an emperor is female, you
need to describe it in contextually linked statements. You can’t
compress that into a single noun phrase in Klingon by any means
I know.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Basically, if you’ve done whatever it takes to be
emperor, your sexual gender is less important to people than
your rank.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">And if the gender of the emperor is really important
to you, it becomes important for you to know the emperor very
personally, because inappropriate comments or gestures could
have undesirable consequences.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">If we ever get a female president, she won’t be a
*presidentress*. She’ll be a president. This is like that.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>No, this is different. <i>Warrior, ambassador, captain,</i> and
<i>president</i> are all gender-neutral words in English. An <i>Emperor</i>
is male and an empress is female. When we are given two words for
<i>emperor</i> in Klingon, it is not automatically the case that
those words also mean <i>empress.</i></p>
<p>Qa'yIn asked what <i>I</i> would do to translate <i>empress,</i>
and that's the question I answered. I didn't answer what I think
the correct answer is, because I don't know. The words might be
gender neutral, and Okrand simply failed to consider including the
feminine translation. There might be different words for <i>empress.</i>
There might be a modification of the word for <i>emperor</i> to
get <i>empress. </i>We have reason to believe that political
authority is limited by gender in some ways, and we have reason to
believe that the concept of an empress is not unknown to Klingons.
We do not know anything about whether Klingons deem the rank more
important than the gender.<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
SuStel
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://trimboli.name">http://trimboli.name</a></pre>
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