On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 4:06 PM SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
On 12/18/2019 3:45 PM, qurgh lungqIj wrote:
I'd rather not frame it either way. I'd rather use the words to describe actions regardless of what my cultural or linguistic biases might try to dictate about those actions.
Klingon is not a technical or programming language; it does not express objective truths beyond cultural or linguistic biases. It has those biases built in on purpose, and many of the words Okrand gives us come with some kind of cultural or linguistic note on their usage.
Right, and I want to use ITS cultural and linguistic biases, not the ones I've been raised with in my language and culture. This is my personal choice.
And I'm telling you you don't KNOW Klingon's cultural and
linguistic biases because you're not a Klingon. We only know what
we're told, and we haven't been told this.
We do know that ngagh can refer to what "people" do, since we have {targhlIj yIngagh! yIruch!}. That's a clear example of one "person" telling another "person" to do an act with an "animal".
And it's an insult. It's probably an insult because it lowers the
person spoken to to the level of an animal. It's not evidence at
all that ngagh is what people do, because you're
linguistically transforming your target into an animal. We have
other Klingon insults that do the same thing, like Ha'DIbaH.
In other words, you're treating the target like a not-person.
It's like using the non-language-using suffixes on a noun to refer to a language-using being. HoDlIj is insulting to the HoD, probably because you're implying the HoD is not capable of using language. Even though you know perfectly well that the HoD is quite capable of using language. You can't use HoDlIj in normal conversation, even if it's perfectly understandable.
Likewise, targhlIj yIngagh may be lowering the target to
the level of a targ. This sentence proves nothing about whether
people can normally ngagh. All we know is that in that
kind of insult, they can. But our knowledge is completely limited
to that domain.
To me, that usage seems to match with how we use the f-word, and is what led me to speculate that {ngagh} is what one thing does to another thing, regardless of if that thing would be classified as a "person" or an "animal".
It only matches one sense of the f-word, and only loosely. The
f-word has plenty of other meanings that, in the right context,
are perfectly acceptable and don't match. In Klingon, ngagh
appears to be usable by people in order to insult them, possibly
by lowering them to the level of an animal, but can it be used
outside of that sense? That's been the question all along. Can ngagh
be used the same was as nga'chuq apparently can? We don't
have evidence. We have lots of opinions, but no evidence.
You gave your speculation, for which you seem to agree we have no evidence. I didn't see any reason to comment on that. For your part, you ignored my request to provide an example of how someone in the mainstream would use the word mate to refer to people having sex.
I did, because it's totally off-topic and has nothing to do with the Klingon language. I have no interest in helping you locate information about English that you can locate yourself.
There is another special-use word in English. Literally, it just
refers to the dung of a male bovine. In this case it is an
expression of disbelief that you are actually capable of backing
up your statement.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name