Re: Titles in conlangs (was: Re: "Madam"/"Madame" Chair/man/person (was: Umlauts))

How about magister and magistrix or magistra?

Adam

--- Isidora Zamora <isidora@...> wrote:
> >To try and bring this back to Conlanging, anyone
> have titles in their
> >conlangs that can/can't get pluralized?  That have
> no equivalents in
> >English or other natlangs?
>
> No, usually I've been able to make a translation
> that is good enough, but I
> have one very annoying case where a truly proper
> translation cannot be made
> into English.  Trehelish judges are called by a
> title that roughly
> translates to "Lord."  So far, so good.  The problem
> is that Trehelish
> civil servants can be female as well as male, and
> there are female judges
> (one of whom figures prominantly in my story.)  So
> what do you call a
> female judge?  In English, the feminine of "Lord" is
> "Lady," and that does
> not give quite the effect that I was going for.  The
> actual semantic
> content of the title is really along the lines of
> the Latin "Domina," the
> feminine of "Dominus."  (And I am aware that the
> Latin can mean
> Master/Mistress as well as Lord/whatever.)
>
> I use "Master" as the translation of what are
> probably two different
> Trehelish titles.  One of them is the the person
> that you are apprenticed
> to, as per ordinary English usage, and the other is
> a military title
> encompassing a number of high-ranking officers.  Now
> that I actually think
> about it, I cannot imagine that the language could
> possibly use the same
> title to refer to both.  I may have to do something
> about that and break it
> up into two terms.  Not long ago, when discussing
> the "Lady" issue, my
> husband suggested that I might need to use the
> native word for the
> title.  I would rather not do that, because it would
> be likely to cause the
> text not to flow so well and be an extra bit of
> confusion for the
> reader.  If I can do all the titles in English
> translation, the reader has
> a more intuitive sense of what is going on.
>
> At least the military are all men, so I don't have
> the problem of needing
> to use the feminine of Master.  The femine of Master
> is Mistress, and that
> word carries some connotations of its own, which
> were not at all what I had
> in mind.  If you say "his master" and then say "his
> mistress," the second
> will not generally be perceived as being the
> feminine of the first; it will
> be perceived as being something entirely different.
> This could be a
> problem in my non-military usage of "master," if
> there are situations where
> women take apprentices, which there probably are.
>
> I haven't yet decided whether the "sir" that
> civilians use in order to be
> polite to each other is the same "sir" that soldiers
> use when addressing a
> superior.  I had been assuming that they were the
> same word, but I can see
> now that they needn't be.
>
> Does anyone know whether it would be at all likely
> that the native forms of
> these titles might have only one, gender-neutral
> form rather than having
> separate forms for addressing males and females?
> Does any culture do
> that?  The Trehelish language has two grammatical
> genders, but they are not
> in the least perceived as being masculine and
> feminine.
>
> Isidora

=====
Il prori ul pa&#38621;veju fi dji atexindu mutu madji
fached. -- Carrajena proverb

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