[Tlhingan-hol] 19 new words to create

[Jesse Manoogian]

>> Looks as if I hit the nail on the head with this one! Perhaps Marc Okrand should >declare this usage [SuD = blonde] official so it can get into the next edition of the >Klingon dictionary.
>
>That's not really how it works. SuD means be blue, be green, be yellow.  If you >hear that someone's hair is SuD you'll guess that the hair is a colour in that range, >and dealing with humans you're likely going to guess the only natural hair colour >that calls in that range. That English has hair-colour specific vocabulary words >doesn't require any other language to do so.  Klingon is a context-sensitive >language.  Declaring SuD=blonde on this basis is sort of like determining that x=3 >on an algebra problem, and thereafter expecting that x will always equal three.

I'm not requesting that the definition of "SuD" be changed so that it always means "be blonde". My idea is simply that the definition in the dictionary be updated from "be green; be blue; be yellow" to "be green; be blue; be yellow; be blonde". "Be green" is one of the current three equivalents, and yet no one is insisting that "SuD" must always mean "be green".
The range of colors must say something interesting about Klingon optics, BTW. A lot of languages merge "blue" and "green", but Klingon throws in yellow, too. And yet purple, pink and brown all get their own words.
>>>>>I put on a skit at the last qep?a? of <jIboy SuD, wej mIl?oD je>. See if you can untangle that.
>>
>> Lessee . . . "cute blonde one/Blondie, also a charming teddy bear"?
>
>Excellent job on Blondie for jIboy SuD: when you figure out the rest you will realize>that the traditional translation is not the one you chose, but means  the same 
>thing.

Thanks!
>Most people would use the other translation of je here, but again yours means the >same thing.

So . . . "and"?

>You have selected the translation for wejpuH instead of the translation for the unrelated word wej.
Oh . . . sorry. I thought "wejpuH" must have been meant, since "charming" goes along so well with "cute". Now I see that wejpuH/charming is only ironic.
So . . . "not yet"?
>Also you have selected the translation for mIl'oD ngeb, and not mIl'oD. Do you >have a self-programmed look-up tool that is returning partial matches, or are you >just using a vocabulary list carelessly? It is important not to disassemble Klingon >words beyond actual suffixes and prefixes.

I saw that teddy bear was "mIl'oD ngeb", but considering "mIl'oD" means "sabre bear" (apparently an animal in the Star Trek universe?), I didn't see how "Blondie" and "cute" could be used with something about a sabre bear, and figured that someone may have been shortening the word for teddy bear instead. So is it really a comment about a sabre bear? (I suppose I should look this animal up on a Star Trek site.)
>> Thanks for this insight. I'm not too into Klingon culture, I'm just a conlang >>aficionado. I like to watch lexica grow. (The ultimate in conlang lexica is Classical >>Yiklamu, with over 91,000
>> words.) I've watched the lexicon of Klingon grow over the past few years, to over >>3,000 words. Here's to hoping someday it reaches 4,000.
>
>I would prefer to never again have another new Klingon word, if the alternative >were for us to grow to three thousand capable speakers. There's room for people >to be playing different games in this same sandbox, but I prefer to build castles, >and am a little confused by those whose primary interest seems to be counting the >grains of sand.

Difference of interest then . . . for me, there's just a thrill when a conlang allows you to say so many things without having to resort to non-canonical circumlocutions.
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