tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 06 13:51:38 1995
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Re: Re PetaQ
>Date: Tue, 6 Jun 1995 16:23:45 -0400
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: [email protected]
>As far as petaQ goes, I have rewatched my Voyager episode where the Klingon
>B'Elanna says it to her Human half. I took it in to my schools T.V. studio
>and ran it through a voice anylizer. I came up with "be'taH". You could
>distinctally hear the "be" and not "pe" so therefore I wish to once again
>enter my opinion that it is a Negative Woman.
The speech as uttered by actors on episodes is notoriously horrendous. I'm
frankly surprised we can make out *ANYTHING*. It strikes me as extremely
unlikely that they'd consult Okrand for a new "nasty word" and ONLY that in
the entire episode. More likely they flipped through the dictionary and
got a reasonably good pronunciation that happens to sound a little like
what is pretty much nonsense. A woman at a negative angle makes me think
of someone lying on a situp-bench, with her head below her feet. Um, maybe
that does indicate something in Klingon culture, but it doesn't seem to me
that a throwaway line in an episode is the way to tell us that. Occam's
Razor acts too: it's just plain more likely that something that sounds like
an attempt to pronounce "petaQ" in a situation where "petaQ" is eminently
suitable probably *is* an attempt to pronounce "petaQ", when the
alternative is something that makes little to no sense in context.
~mark