On 12/4/2016 12:18 PM, Alan Anderson wrote:
On Sun, Dec 4, 2016 at 11:50 AM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name <mailto:sustel@trimboli.name>> wrote:
But then it really behooves you to explain why Okrand didn't just go with *tel wovmoHwI'.*
{tel wovmoHwI'} would sound like it was brightening the wing. That's not what wing lights do. There are hull spotlights on the Enterprise (see http://showcase.netins.net/web/marc111creations/PL_Enterprise_Refit_WIP_1_fi... ), but not on a Bird of Prey.
/Wing-location lights/ sounds like they're brightening the wing's location. What are wing-location lights? I don't have the poster and I can find no high-resolution images. Are they navigation lights? The possibilities here include: Okrand was thinking /lights on the wings/ and put a type 5 suffix on the first noun, forgetting or ignoring the rule; or Okrand was thinking /wing-location lights,/ which I still don't understand. Let's suppose you have a pistol with lights on it. You want to label them. The word for /pistol/ is *HIch.* The word for /light/ is *wovmoHwI'.* So /pistol lights/ is *HIch wovmoHwI'.* It doesn't mean lights that illuminate a pistol; it's not *(HIch wovmoH)wI'.* But you might want to avoid that ambiguity, so you think, /lights ON a pistol,/ and this leads you to—incorrectly—say **HIchDaq wovmoHwI'.* I'm not saying this is unquestionably what Okrand did. But this particular error happens a lot with students of the language, and Okrand is quite capable of making the same mistake for the same reason. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name