villainous-queer-deactivated202 asked:

I'm looking for honorifics of all genders and other such polite terms of address to a new acquaintance. 'sir' or 'mx. smith' and stuff. Writing a fic where Garak is being polite to a new alien and maybe teaching said alien how to be polite to other Cardassians. This alien would be a nongendered pronoun/honorific if such a thing exists in the language.

cardassianlanguage answered:

Such a thing does indeed exist, as yours truly is nonbinary. :Db The word Garak would use is i’ces (ee’shays, with the apostrophe being a glottal stop, like the middle part of “uh-oh”).

For completion’s sake, “sir” is i’duxt (ee’ducht, with the “ch” pronounced as in “Bach”) and “ma’am/ms./miss” is i’ruxt (ee’rucht).

There are also a couple of words to indicate someone’s social position relative to you. These terms are all non-gendered.

atsi (ah-tsee): person who is inferior in social status to me
jasi (jah-see): person who is superior in social status to me

(And I just realised we don’t have a word for a social equal, but I’m assuming that would be extremely rare, since Cardassians probably start going after familial background and vesala and so on to figure out who the real superior/inferior is.)

The Cardassian Sourcebook also came up with a system of social stratification; if you’re interested, let me know and I can go into depth with those in another ask.

Happy writing!