On Tue, 13 Apr 2021 at 22:51, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

On 4/13/2021 4:41 PM, Will Martin wrote:

Okay, so a new question occurred to me… Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Do we have any sex-gendered nouns besides mother, father, and other blood relatives or spouses? Even then, Okrand slid in some odd ones, like {tey’}, which basically means “a not-gender-specific child of a same-gender sibling of one of your parents”.

If there are no non-blood-relative-or-spouse sex-gender-specific nouns, then the definitions are likely generally mail as a simple style point in Okrand’s writing, like saying, “A person must trust his instincts,” instead of “her instincts” or “his or her instincts” or “their instincts”. It’s just the way he writes them, by default.

We have ghojmoq nurse, nanny, governess, which does not appear to have a male version. Again, it's the English translation that is gendered; we don't know about the Klingon word.

Again, this was a case of necessity. The word was made up by TNG writers for the episode "Sins of the Father". In the script, the word was written "ghojmoK" (sic), and was spoken by Worf to refer to Kahlest: "She was my ghojmoK... my nurse." I'm pretty sure the writers looked up various words related to an adult who takes care of a child in TKD, came up {ghojmoH} "teach, instruct", and either deliberately or by accident changed the ending to make up a new word, which Dr. Okrand then retroactively made official by adding it to the Appendix. It's literally been used once to refer to a specific character who happened to be female, so we can't infer if it can or cannot refer to a male caretaker of a young child.

De'vID