[Tlhingan-hol] nuqDaq ghaH 'arHa'e'?

[Rohan Fenwick]

ghItlhpu' De'vID, jatlh:
> {mIS} v. be confused, mixed up
> {missing verb} v. be confused, perplexed

(poD vay')

> I recognise that most KLI mailing list members consider {mIS} to mean
> "be confused, mentally perplexed" by what ghuchu'wI' called "twenty
> years of consistent usage" in the thread that I linked. I just think
> that those people who have assumed that's what it means have missed a
> joke that's obvious to people who speak languages where the two senses
> of "be confused" map to different words, and have "confused" two
> definitions of the word in a way that underlies the joke (and they are
> "confused"). A literal reading of the definition doesn't imply mental
> confusion. That's an extension of the given meaning. Perhaps Klingons
> have the same idiom in this instance as American English speakers, but
> that's "not canon".

Like ghunchu'wI', I disagree, and think you're reading too much into that secondary gloss. An important point to remember is not just that American English speakers are making this interpretation, but also that Marc Okrand himself is a native speaker of American English. Since he's the one who wrote TKD, it's entirely reasonable to take the natural American English interpretation of a TKD gloss. In this instance, "mixed up" is a phrasal adjective also firmly linked with the idea of mental confusion, perplexity or bewilderment in English (not just American, but more generally), and Google Ngrams yields robust examples going back at least a century where the sense is very clearly mental. I couldn't help smiling at this example from 1899 that's quite on point:

"It is hard when you are learning a different language to your own, you get mixed up, and there are such a lot of peculiarities in French, and if you do not put your heart into it you will never learn." (Child Life, vol. 1/2, 1899)

(Comme en français, c'est en klingon, n'est-ce pas?)

As such, I don't think it at all likely that physical disarray or disorder is the primary sense of the
 word {mIS}, and I believe it's erroneous to rely on the gloss of "mixed up" to argue that such is the case. That's not to say that I couldn't still be proven wrong, of course, and it's also not to discount the point you make about some conventions being a matter of historical accident among Klingon speakers. (Though even there, my experience is that many of us still do tend to vacillate on matters where it's known there's no clear canon support - gawd knows I wouldn't like to be pinned down on an opinion as to the appropriate syntax of {HuS} "hang".) But ultimately, I think that {‹mIS›mo' mach mIS}.

QeS 'utlh
 		 	   		  
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