Favourite quote of the last day

[andrewducker]

(On bilingual signage)
Klingon Signs would probably say "only a man with no honor would park here between the hours of 9am and 5pm!"

From

Comments

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

But would man then refer to a Klingon?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I assume Klingon would has different words for "human" and "honorable warrior male" and that the appropriate one would be used and translated in the appropriate way :)

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Are females then outwith the Klingon honour system ;-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I don't know for sure, but I got that distinct impression from ToS :) I recall some decisive female Klingons from later series and from startrek books, but it seems very likely that a fictional warrior male-dominated society invented in the 1960s would be invented to share English's unfortunate equation between certain sorts of honour, and the male warrior stereotype.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Although two things about English, compared to other European languages, are its avoidance of gender (masculine/feminine and possibly neuter) and politeness (different forms of you).

Basing Klingon on, say, Japanese would seem more sensible to me ;-)

But then, why should an alien language follow human patterns anyway?

Worf meets Whorf: A catchy title for an imaginary academic paper...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That is, I was considering Klingon language as it actually exists, and asking "suppose the Startrek producers made up a constructed language, what would they make up?" rather than "suppose the Klingon home planet existed and the Klingon language evolved naturally, what would it be like?"

Although looking on wikipedia I may not have been right. It's hard to tell if "man", "person", etc, map exactly on to existing Klingon terms or not.

(Tip. DO NOT SEARCH for "klingon sex" on google. Try "klingon language gender" or something :))

Worf meets Whorf

LOL.

Of course, hypotheses that "The standard Klingon greeting is 'what do you want' which reveals a lot about their culture" BECOMES true in the invented language, because someone made up a plausible cultural-language connection in the phrase, and then having made it up, PUT it into Klingon, so regardless of how true those sorts of connections are in naturally evolved languages, they're almost certainly true of Klingon, because the people making it up to look as if it evolved thought in those ways :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

ROFL