[Tlhingan-hol] wovmoHbogh jan

[Rohan Fenwick]

mujangpu' André, jatlh:
> I, in turn, tend to disagree with QeS 'utlh on this one.

That surprises me, because upon reaching your conclusion, I find that you've basically laid out a position that agrees entirely with mine. You said, and I quote: "A really good printed dictionary would list {wovmoHbogh jan} as a 
translation for 'light' and perhaps 'lamp' in its English-Klingon part, 
but might not list it as a lemma in the Klingon-English part. The entry 
would be found as a sub-entry or perhaps example phrase under {wov} (or 
{wovmoH} maybe) and {jan}."

I'm genuinely confused. Is that not what I was saying? That in making a dictionary, it's important to distinguish what constitutes a Klingon lexeme on the one hand from what is a Klingon translation or gloss of an English lexeme on the other? I have no problem with using {wovmoHbogh jan} as a translation or gloss of English "light". I quote myself: "...sure, it's a good idea to use [wovmoHbogh jan] as an example phrase or a compound, 
listed in a subsection under the verb {wov} or the noun {jan}. And it's a
 good Klingon translation of the English noun "light, lamp"."

jatlhtaH André:
> The dictionaries a Klingon learner/speaker is likely to use is a dictionary in
> both directions, and for us, especially English-Klingon seems the most useful.
> As far as Klingon goes, words like {Ha'DIbaH ghIH tIr ngogh je} 'hamburger',
> although just being a descriptive phrase, is just as much a collocation as is
> {Doq 'ej Qaj wuS rur} 'to be brown' or {tlhIngan Hol} 'Klingon language', and

There are many problems with this. Firstly, it's kind of disingenuous to use the word "collocation" for the first two. Nowhere in canon is {Doq 'ej Qaj wuS rur} translated as "to be brown". It's rendered by Marc as "be orange/red and resemble kradge
lips" (MSN News 21-02-1998), and is given as an *example*, not the prototype, of how to talk about an object that is a *specific shade* of brown. And as for {Ha'DIbaH ghIH tIr ngogh je}, like many other Terran-specific objects from EuroTalk, the Klingon is clearly (to me, at any rate) just a description of an object that's otherwise unfamiliar to the Klingon eye. Secondly, if you consider {tlhIngan Hol} a collocation worthy of lexifying, expand that view systematically: the collocation {tlhIngan SuvwI'} is a far more frequent one in Klingon text than {tlhIngan Hol} is. Why should {tlhIngan Hol} be lexicalised but {tlhIngan SuvwI'} not be?

taH:
> what people like me - who're not yet fluent in the language - do, when writing
> something in Klingon and lacking word, is to look it up in the dictionary. We
> hope to not only find 1:1 expressions (e.g. non-compounds) but also descriptive 
> phrases that are common or have been used before. If I want to mention a
> hamburger, I'd prefer to use an already established term for it rather than
> making up my own. The same is true for 'lamp'. I see these words as lexicalized.

That's begging the question, though. What I argue is that the form of {Ha'DIbaH ghIH tIr ngogh je} speaks to it being unlikely that this is even an "established term" at all, and that the same goes for {wovmoHbogh jan}. Similarly, we know that "car" may be rendered with {puH Duj}, but the usage of the transparent phrase {puH Duj} in a canon source doesn't for a moment make me think "well, this is the only phrase in canon, so I'd best use it, because the phrases {yav Duj} and {ghor Duj} that others devised previously are now less valuable or meaningful".

taH:> For my own dictionary I try to include all kinds of words and translations,
> marking non-canonical translations with an asterisk. When I enter a new
> word I carefully think about what I might look for in the English-Klingon
> part. I would not enter something like {paq QaQ} 'good book' anywhere if
> Marc Okrand uses that word anywhere, because it's not really a fixed
> term.

Nor is {wovmoHbogh jan}: we already know from canon that this device can alternately be called {wovmoHwI'}.

(poD vay')

taH:
> But I'd add {ngogh mutlhwI'} 'bricklayer', because I might someday want
> to look for this word in the English-Klingon part and rather have an already
> set phrase instead of coming up with something on my own.

And that's just fine (not only because {ngogh mutlhwI'} isn't quite transparent on its own in terms of its sense). I'm not talking about the English-Klingon part of a dictionary, only about what is worthwhile considering as a lemma in the Klingon-English part.

taH:
> The new word list has a slightly different purpose. I'd say it's useful to also
> add {wovmoHbogh jan} 'light' to it, simply because in English we happen to
> use one word for it.

I thought the purpose of the New Words List was so that Klingon learners, upon reading an unfamiliar word in a Klingon text, would be able to find its meaning? Isn't the Klingon-English aspect of the New Words List the most crucial one?

Long story short, what one does with one's own dictionary is one's own business, and that's fine. I suppose what I'm arguing here that, as a transparent phrase rather than a word, {wovmoHbogh jan} doesn't need to belong in, as Quvar put it, "every well-managed dictionary". We need to be careful about what we term a "word" in Klingon language study (and I know, I've been on this soapbox before; I apologise for sounding like a {'I'SeghIm}, that's not my intention at all).

QeS 'utlh
 		 	   		  
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