On Sun, Dec 4, 2016 at 11:50 AM, SuStel <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_files/themotionpicture394.jpg ), 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