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

>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

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