On 9/11/2018 10:26 AM, qurgh lungqIj wrote:
It's my belief that the use of {-wI'} over {-wIj}, {ghaH} over {'oH}, etc says much more about the speaker's relationship with the object in question than it does about the object itself. I don't believe there is an objective list somewhere that says "X get's this suffix, Y get's this suffix". It's all subjective. There is no right or wrong, there is only the successful, or unsuccessful, transfer of ideas and concepts from one individual to the next.
I mostly agree. There are some times when a noun's gender is set by the external language rather than by the individual speaker's person opinion — *DeSqIvDu'* instead of *DeSqIvmey *for the handles of pots, for instance — but most of the time the rule is simply the usual /capable of using language/body parts/other./ It's just that the speaker has latitude to decide which category a noun belongs in. If you anthropomorphize your targ to the point of believing it speaks to you, or if you think parrots or computers actually understand what they're saying to you, you'll use *ghaH* instead of *'oH,* because you're just applying the usual rule according to your assessment of these nouns' statuses. You wouldn't normally vary your use of gender for a given noun, unless maybe as a rhetorical device or to speak in another's voice, or if your evaluation of two different entities using the same noun are different (e.g., robot Number Five versus the other Nova robots). Were she speaking Klingon, Dr. Pulaski would have started out calling Data *'oH* and switched to calling him *ghaH* as she came to realize her error. Most of the time a ballpoint pen would be an *'oH,* but Veet Voojagig would have referred to one as *ghaH.* Generally, there IS a right answer for most nouns, and listeners would look at you suspiciously if you used the wrong gender. But speakers are allowed to vary in the fuzzy areas where a reasonable argument could be made in favor of an unexpected gender. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name