Hahh. Apparently I should not have dappled with the killing words. Ingsve offered some critique too.
While I agree that slaughtering animals is indeed usually as pragmatig and clean as possible, I won't give up without a fight
My understanding of English might be a bit off... To me the large part of why "to slaughter" has (both in English and maybe consequently in Dothraki) an extension to killing people brutally and senselessly is surely in the cold ease of the killing: it's a killing where there is no struggle worth a mention and where the victim is given no more value or respect than an animal (the animal here is supposedly not well respected and valued as a person). But there is also an analogy in brutality: "slaughter" can be taken to go beyond just killing, to exsanguination* and evisceration, and while this is just pragmatic food preparation in animal slaughter, it is surely seen as an excessive brutality in killing a man.
*
Dothraki probably slaughter animals by bleeding them to death, which, while actually probably one of the quicker ways to end the animal's suffering, does not seem so neat. Actually I read many animals are still killed this way (you need to get the blood out and the dead don't bleed so well), but nowadays & hereabouts they should be unconsious and senseless by then.I guess when I added the second sense to
ogat, I felt I needed to communicate that this "killing a man" sense was a secondary meaning (kind of metaphoric extension), not the other way around, so I added the cumbersome "as if slaughtering an animal".
The whole "killing brutally" sense is inferred from David's remark "
Ogat literally means “to slaughter” (for the purposes of eating). It’s been extended to mean “kill” as the word has in English (and many other languages, I’m sure)," so the brutality is my interpretation and all in all rather questionable. Simple "1) to slaughter 2) to kill" might be a safer bet. The particulars might be better left elsewhere (to specific Uses page...).
One might just drop the whole second meaning, as "to slaughter" should quite accurately encompass the whole field of meaning, as far as we know, but this has a small problem - we can't by default expect a Dothraki word to have the same extented meanings as English has (eg. we know
loqat means
to hold, so it should serve in "Hold this rock," but in "He holds magnificent parties." it would be very much suspect), so the confirmation that the translation carries beyond its core meaning is not without merits.
To have only one definition, something like "to slaughter an animal, to kill brutally" would be, IMO, slightly wrong. If you have a word defined with a list of words, say "
assikhqoyi ni. sign, omen", this should mean that the Dothraki word either has a wider meaning that encompasses the both English words, or that the Dothraki word has a meaning that isn't accurately translatable to any English word, but falls somewhere between the words offered.
Ogat, as far as we know, should have no inherent indication to coldness, cruelty or brutality - those tones should only emerge from metaphorical extension.
