🚀 go-pugleaf

zornow@hpcc01.corp.hp.com (Claudia Zornow) writes:


>The "n'ha" usage comes from Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series
>of science fiction novels.  I don't know whether she made it up or
>got it from some known language.  She has a set of female characters
>called Renunciates, or Free Amazons, who have made themselves
>independent of the strictures normally imposed on women of Darkover,
>and who change their names to show matrilineal descent.

As someone remarked earlier on, suggesting that it might be of
Celtic origin, there is in fact in Irish a preposition "na"
which translates the genitive plural. So  "x na y" is "x of the y's".
Perhaps that is where Marion Zimmer Bradley drew her "n'ha" from,
but it needs not be a conscious memory.