On 13 July 2017 at 22:07, Lieven <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
Though {Saw} and {nay} are defined in terms of male/female and when used in this way everything is fine, the idea is not simply that when men get married they do something that's somehow different from what women do when they get married. The concept is more of a yin-yang thing.
It's funny that he mentions yin-yang, because what he describes with {Saw}, {nay}, and {tlhogh} parallels the development in Chinese. https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb=娶 "to take a wife / to marry (a woman)" [ = {Saw} ] https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb=嫁 "(of a woman) to marry / to marry off a daughter / to shift (blame etc)" [ = {nay} ] (Aside: Yes, the Chinese verb used of a woman for marrying really does have a secondary meaning which means to shift shame onto someone else. Make of that what you will.) https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb=婚 "to marry / marriage / wedding / to take a wife" [ = {tlhogh} ] As a noun, 婚 means "marriage" or "wedding". As a verb, the archaic meaning is to "take a wife", but in modern usage it's changed to mean "to take a spouse", "to marry". It's more commonly used in this compound (with the verb 結 meaning "knot, tie; join, connect"): https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb=結婚 Instead of saying H娶W or W嫁H, it's become common to say H同W結婚 [同 means "together", so basically {婚chuq H W je}]. Also, the whole complementary roles thing is exactly what they say at Chinese weddings, except instead of Kahless and Lukara, it's the story of the dragon and the phoenix. (If you've ever been to a Chinese banquet hall where they do weddings, you might see a mural of a dragon and phoenix facing off. That's where the newlywed couple sits during a wedding reception.) I don't know if MO got the {Saw}/{nay} distinction from Chinese (it's not the only language to have separate verbs for "to marry" for men and women), but the whole yin-yang description makes it very suspicious. Another thing which was discussed recently (over on FB) which might have come from or been influenced by Chinese is the distinction between {pob}, {jIb}, {rol}, and {loch}. In Chinese, they're considered four different things: (體)毛 = {pob}, (頭)髮 = {jIb}, 鬍鬚 = {rol}, and 髭 = {loch}. I don't know if Chinese is the only language to make that distinction, or if Klingon considers {rol} and {loch} to be {pob} or {jIb} (i.e., whether "facial hair" is "head hair" or "body hair"), but at least they have in common that they distinguish (have separate words for) "body hair" and "head hair". -- De'vID