[Tlhingan-hol] do {vIttlhegh} become {ngo'} or {qan}?

[Bellerophon, modeler]

Interesting thought. And might the plural even be {vIttlheghpu'}? If a
proverb is considered to be in some sense capable of speech and to have a
life of its own...
This is more interesting than the supposedly objective division between
living and non-living, speaking and non-speaking, and more like the idioms
of real language.
(And if STID is canon, kill me now. It's just an alternate reality in which
palms meet faces much more frequently and with greater force. And Khan
might not be quite fluent in Klingon.)

~'eD


On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 12:27 AM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:

> When I saw {vIttlhegh ngo'}, I instinctively thought it should've been
> {vIttlhegh qan}:
> https://twitter.com/ghunwI/status/375061262540890113
>
> But is my instinct correct? Which would you use?
>
> I think my intuition is coloured by the Chinese correspondents
> (Chinese makes the same distinction between not-new-old and
> not-young-old as Klingon):
>
> ngo' - v. be old (not new) -- 舊 (not 新)
> qan - v. be old (not young) -- 老 (not 青)
>
> In Chinese, a time-worn proverb is described as old with age (老), not
> old due to lack or fading of novelty (which is what 舊 would imply).
>
> But the Klingon "old" pair may not work in exactly the same way as the
> Chinese. Indeed, we know young Klingons don't describe new language as
> {chu'} or {Qup}, but as {ghoQ}. They also refer to old-fashioned
> language as {Doy'}, but how do Klingons refer to statements which are
> old, but still venerated?
>
> --
> De'vID
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tlhingan-hol mailing list
> Tlhingan-hol at kli.org
> http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol
>



-- 
My modeling blog:          http://bellerophon-modeler.blogspot.com/
My other modeling blog:  http://bellerophon.blog.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20130906/86db8268/attachment.html>