[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: tIS

[Will Martin]

{tIS} is a verb, being used as an adjective, so there’s a space between it and the adjective. {-Hom} is a noun suffix, and so, there are no spaces between it and the noun.

Multiple nouns can be merged together to become compound nouns, but it is unusual for Okrand to give us a new noun that includes what appears to be an adjective as part of that noun. It can happen. It just usually doesn’t.

Also, keep in mind that the written version of Klingon that we use is not truly the written Klingon language. It’s just a phonetic representation of spoken Klingon, so the placement of spaces is simply something that we use to make it easier to know where the word boundaries are. We don’t know that Klingon written language actually has spaces. Most modern Japanese writings apparently don’t use spaces. Roman writing chiseled in stone often didn’t use spaces.

But by convention, we put spaces between words, and we don’t combine words, except for relatively rare combined nouns. Creating new noun combinations and presenting them as compound nouns is one of those moderately controversial practices that some accept more than others. Basically, if it comes from Okrand, it’s okay. If it comes from someone else, then some people will accept it while others will reject it, and there’s an odd kind of informal, intuitive sense that drives certain non-Okrand complex nouns to become more widely acceptable than others.

For myself, it’s almost like using {-mey} on body parts. If it has a kind of poetic reasoning behind it, or if it is trying to be a little jarring, or if it conveys a generic sense of noun well, then I’m less inclined to snarl at it. But there’s no hard and fast rule that defines what can be a compound noun.

The point is that {De’wI’ tIS} can’t be a compound noun because {tIS} isn’t a noun.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Oct 8, 2015, at 12:25 PM, HoD qunnoQ <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > "A computer of any kind is, of course, a {De'wI'}. A laptop is a {De'wI'Hom} (but Maltz said that {De'wI' tIS} could be used also)."
> 
> why "De'wI' tIS" and not "De'wI'tIS" ?
> 
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu <mailto:sboozer at uchicago.edu>> wrote:
> > Klingon Word of the Day for Thursday, October 08, 2015
> >
> > Klingon word: tIS
> > Part of speech: verb
> > Definition: be light (weight)
> 
> AFAIK never used in a sentence.
> 
> "A computer of any kind is, of course, a {De'wI'}. A laptop is a {De'wI'Hom} (but Maltz said that {De'wI' tIS} could be used also)." (Lieven, 11/16/2014 < qepHom 2014 < MO)
> 
> SEE ALSO:
> wov             be light, be bright (v)
> 'ugh            be heavy (v)
> 
> 
> --
> Voragh
> Ca'Non Master of the Klingons
> 
> 
> 
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