Gerunds and Entities
Saul Epstein 
Sun, 9 Nov 1997 19:18:03 -0600

I was thinking the other day that it might give us some additional
momentum if we had a name, like tlhingan Hol (forgive my spelling)
has in the Klingon Language Institute. (I also realize that the KLI
is much more than a name, but you've got to start somewhere.)

Rather than just calling this effort the Vulcan Language Institute,
as some have, I thought referring to it as the Vulcan Academy
Linguistics Department might be a worthwhile conceit.

This inevitably led me to try to come up with a way to say
"Linguistics Department" in Vulcan. "Linguistics" proved to be
relatively easy. We have two words

	prala		speak
	khu		watch

from which a compound

	pralakhu	"speech-observe" or "speech-study"

can be made. This would, I think, describe what linguists do. To make
an "entity" or a noun from this "action/state" probably requires
making it a gerund though. Currently, the gerund suffix is "-at"
which, unfortunately, is also the genitive or possessive suffix. So I
wonder now if anyone would mind if we change the gerund suffix to
"-te." Doing so would have the side benefit of partly translating the
government bodies from _Spock's_World_. If we do this, "linguistics"
might be

	pralakhute

and other fields of study could be similarly named.

One bit of confusion, which I see now should probably have been asked
of the Zvelebils, regards exactly the role of explicit gerunds in a
language which doesn't seem to mark parts of speech except through
the arrangement of words into sentences. In other words, I can't tell
if a "verb" like "khu" cannot act as a noun without being marked with
the gerund suffix. I can't tell if "nouns" cannot go the other
direction.

Anyway, I couldn't find in the lexicon a word that would do for
"department" or "division" or "that which is a distinct part of
something larger." There are plenty of words dealing with separation
in a more severe sense -- like "outcaste" -- but that's not what I'm
after. So we'll just have to make something up, like... /ngox/. So
"linguistics department could be

	pralakhute ngox

How does that strike you?

--
from Saul Epstein
liberty*uit,net
www,johnco,cc,ks,us/~sepstein
"Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi
suraketca'."
							-- K'dvarin Urswhl'at