And now we get to MY philosophical point.

The word “status” implies an unchanging state. It’s often numeric, like a temperature measurement, or an average wind speed or velocity (speed, plus direction), but technically speed implies change in location at a measured rate, so it’s a statistic that doesn’t exist without change. Change in location is NECESSARY for speed to exist.

A lot of things in weather don’t exist without change. The barometer readings typically include the modifiers “falling” or “rising”, because the change in the measurement is more meaningful than the specific number frozen in time.

Rain implies a quantity of water moving from the clouds to the ground, changing the state of the cloud (less moist) and the ground (more wet).

Zeus isn’t some passive observer that we ask, “Hey, Zeus! What’s the weather going to be like today?”

Zeus is a guy who gets pissed off at a guy on a boat, picks up a bolt of lightning and tosses it at the mast of that guy’s ship. Zeus is willful and he can DO stuff to the status of the atmosphere.

Everything about Zeus is about changing the weather. You don’t ask Zeus what the weather is going to be like. You pray to Zeus that he’s nice to you while he decides what the weather will be like. Treat him like a meteorologist and he just might mess you up for spite. The whims of Zeus can destroy your home and wipe out your family.

That’s why he’s considered, well, a god, right?

If Dianna is pissed off at you, maybe you’ll have to become a vegetarian, but if Zeus gets pissed off at you, there’s no place to hide.

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)

On May 25, 2021, at 10:50 AM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

On 5/25/2021 10:32 AM, Will Martin wrote:
Of course, we feel different about our word “weather” than we feel about the term “atmosphere status”, but since Klingon doesn’t have a word for “weather”, maybe they feel exactly the same about the phrase {muD Dotlh} as we feel about our word “weather”.

If they do, then it's an idiom we can't recreate through pure analysis. We use the noun weather in a couple of different senses: the collection of wind, water, visibility, and temperature in the atmosphere ("The bad weather wrecked the boat"); the current state of the atmosphere due to all those factors ("The weather isn't looking good for flying today"); and the reporting on this state ("And now on to the weather"). Taken literally, the Klingon muD Dotlh is only the second of these: the state of the atmosphere due to the effects of wind, water, etc.

Now, one could say that Zeus is the god of the state of the atmosphere, and that wouldn't be inaccurate, but when one says Zeus is a god of the weather, I think one is really referring to the first of the senses I mentioned: he commands the wind, water, visibility, temperature, and so on in the sky. Those things aren't the muD Dotlh, though together they can change the muD Dotlh.

In other words, if my boat is being tossed about on the waves, it's not because the status of the atmosphere is tossing it about; it's because the physical phenomena of wind and water in the sky are tossing it about. In English, we use the word weather for both of these things; in Klingon, it appears to me that muD Dotlh is specifically the former, the status of the atmosphere, and we don't seem to have a single term to refer specifically to the collection of physical phenomena.

But because English uses the word weather for both, it's easy for English speakers to confuse muD Dotlh with the physical phenomena.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name
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