On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 12:50 PM SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
On 12/18/2019 12:24 PM, qurgh lungqIj wrote:
Klingons mate. Humans mate too. They might label it "making love", "having sex", "shagging", "doing it", "making the beast with two backs" or something else to try to differentiate it from what the rest of the biological world does, but it's still mating.
Sure, but what we're interested in is labels, or words. Outside of a science-fiction context, nobody speaking modern English says mate to refer to people having sex.
I know people who speak modern English and use mate to refer to people having sex outside of sci-fi. You really shouldn't make generalizations about a billion and a half people unless you personally know them all.
I do. I know them all. Personally.
I'll allow the exception that the socially awkward types who gravitate to science fiction and talk in a way that others consider weird might say that people mate with each other outside of a science fiction context. But that's the exception that proves the rule: the way these people talk is considered weird.
I'll also allow the possibility of anthropological jargon that might use the word that way.
But not in a mainstream way.
Can you give an example in which someone would non-weirdly talk
about people mating?
Or is it primarily used for animals ?
Humans and Klingons are animals.But languages usually distinguish between people and non-people, and Klingon basically does this in its capable-of-using-language suffixes and its pronouns. The distinction here may be important in Klingon. It is in English.
But often Klingon does the opposite of what languages usually do. If something is important to English, it's probably not important for Klingon.
This is demonstrably untrue. "Do the opposite of other languages" was not a design goal of Klingon. "Seem alien" was a design goal, but this mostly manifested in its unlikely sound inventory, its uncommon OVS syntax, and its color words. Far, far more often, Klingon works the SAME as other languages, especially English. Sometimes it does so so well it seems apparently that Okrand didn't even notice he was doing it until it was pointed out to him (e.g., the prefix trick).
You simply can't judge Klingon grammar by assuming that however
English handles something, Klingon does the opposite.
I don't think Klingon uses those suffixes and pronouns to distinguish between "people" and "non-people", but between if the speaker believes that "thing" can, or cannot, communicate with them.
Which is why I said Klingon "basically" does this. If we could divorce Klingon from Star Trek and speak it only in the real world, the difference between capable of using language and person would be almost zero. (Any exceptions are still only theoretical at this point.) A lot of the things we don't call people in the real world would be called people in the Star Trek universe. A horta, for instance, is a person. The actual list of things that are capable of language but are not people is small, and a lot of them are considered edge-cases. A starship computer, for instance: it's certainly not a person, but does it use language? I'd bet even Klingons would hesitate to answer that.
So no, capable of using language is not identical to person,
but neither is it very far away. It's certainly close enough to
recognize that saying that "Humans and Klingons are animals"
doesn't really address the question raised. WE are the ones who
brought up the person-vs-animal argument of ngagh/nga'chuq as
pure speculation; if you'd rather frame it as
capable-of-using-language-vs-not-capable-of-using-language argument
of ngagh/nga'chuq, then do so.
Something could consider itself "people" but lack the ability to communicate that to a Klingon speaker, or a Klingon speaker might misunderstand something as being communication when it's not.
At this point you seem to be questioning the meaning of the word people. In a real-world dictionary you'll find that it means a human being. As I alluded to above, in a universe with Klingons, living rock-pizzas, energy beings, and sentient androids, the meanings of the words person and people will be a bit broader. Whether a Klingon correctly recognizes a thing as language-capable or not is the Klingon's problem, not the language's problem.
"Wowee," said Zaphod, "Zappo."
"Incredible!" breathed Arthur, "the people...! The things...!"
"The things," said Ford Prefect quietly, "are also people."
"The people..." resumed Arthur, "the... other people..."
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name