TGV/MGV - Lesson 32
Ba-|Iyi-Gol-Vuhlkansu - Tupa 32

CLARIFICATION & USE OF ~su ENDING
Starpa'shaya heh Is t'>su<-Shahtan

Several students wanted more information on how TGV and MGV speakers use the ending ~su. Confusion arises because Golic speakers use ~su at the end of nouns, certain adjectives and the names of languages.

In FSE, for example, the word "Vulcan" can mean the planet, a person from that planet, a generic term for their language, and an adjective describing something from or related to the planet Vulcan or its people. This can lead to some confusion, of course, if one is not sure of what one of these is meant.

When it comes to the usage of ~su in TGV and MGV, many students have been confused. We seem to have not completely explained the differences in earlier lessons or in the dictionaries. The dictionaries have been updated and this lesson will help dispel the confusion.

In TGV and MGV, ~su is used to form words that name a people, their language and form an adjective relating to that people, their culture, their planet, etc.

The first use of ~su is the clearest to understand. "Su" is the Golic Vulcan word for "person". For example, Betazed is a planet. In TGV and MGV this is transliterated "Beituh'zed". A person from Betazed is a "beituh'zedsu". (One must remember here that this is a transliteration of Vulcan characters. None of the Golic Vulcan languages still in use have upper case or lower case letters per se. In the Golic Vulcan characters, what FSE transliterates as a capital letter is often handwritten slightly larger than the rest of the characters but there is no change in form other than that. In printed or computer forms, there is usually no difference, although some Vulcans are known to put the first letter in a "bold" form in this usage.) The word for a person is not "capitalized" in Vulcan transliteration.

Another use of ~su is to form the name of the language a people speak. Using the same example above, a person from the Betazed speaks Betazed (the same word in FSE) and their language would be "beituh'zedsu" in TGV and MGV (the same form as the name of person from that planet). This has confused students of TGV and MGV. The origin of this confusion dates back millennia ago on Vulcan. In an ancestral Golic language, the word for language was "tsún", derived from a word for tongue (like in some Earth languages). Thus, that ancient language would have called the Betazed language "beituh'zed-tsún". This is obviously unique from "beituh'zedsu". Over time, as happens in many languages, two different words converge into the same form, although they had different origins. Thus this ~su is a relic from an extinct language that survives into contemporary usage. Vulcans know words by context in usage, so they have no problems knowing which use of "beituh'zedsu" is intended. The word for a language is not "capitalized" in Vulcan transliteration.

The last use of ~su is to form an adjective referring to or describing something to do with a particular people. Using our example again, Betazed also is an adjective referring to or describing something from Betazed. In TGV and MGV, this adjective would be "beituh'zedsu". The adjective is also not capitalized in transliteration. In an ancestral Golic language, the suffix for this construction was "~tsuu". As we pointed out long ago in a lesson on adjectives, this type of adjective nearly always follows the noun(s) it modifies. For example, "Betazed culture" would be "iyula beituh'zedsu".


There are no exercises or examples for this lesson at this time but they may be added in the future.

The student is encouraged to experiment using these words in sentences.

This lesson was put online on
August 20, 2006
and updated on
June 30, 2007 & December 19, 2015.




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operating as the Vulcan Language Institute™.

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