tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 03 12:51:11 1996
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Re: New words in HolQeD 5.1
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>Date: Fri, 3 May 1996 09:04:40 -0700
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>One other piece of evidence to weigh in is that almost all
>polysyllabic Klingon words are nouns. There are very few verb
>roots that are more than one syllable long, like {HoSghaj}. It
>is unlikely that Okrand is suddenly making all his new verbs
>polysyllabic.
This is likely so. However, I did note an unpleasant trend, one that I bet
Okrand doesn't like either. There are a hell of a lot more polysyllabic
words coming out now with the new sources (most of them nouns). And I
don't think they're entirely Okrand's doing. Paramount's writers seem
intent on introducing new Klingon terms every now and then... rather often
in fact, and do so without regard for Klingon. They have their own
perceptionm of what the Klingon language is like, a perception based
on... who knows what, but certainly NOT on a study of tlhIngan Hol. Their
perception seems to involve a great many consonant clusters (hence all
those apostrophes) and polysyllabic words. Why? Who knows; that's what
they think Klingon should be. And poor Okrand is often caught being
expected to canonize these bastard words in the official language, will he
or nill he. They were put there by other people, and now he's forced to
approve them somehow. So we have Tknag hooves and a d'k tahg knife and a
GaTH'K ode and the brek'tal ritual and glob flies... not to mention the
nonsense Worf and Dax mumble at each other that someone's going to have to
canonize eventually under fan-pressure. Ugh. And Okrand has to pollute
whatever plans he had for the feel and flavor and history of Klingon for
these words made up by scriptwriters who are just feeling for a word that
"sounds" good to them. I wish we could get them to cut that out.
Okrand's polysyllabic words often have reasons for being so. Even betleH:
we finally have canon proof that a betleH really is that curved swordy
thing that we've been calling a betleH all along, and that batlh'etlh
isn't the term for the weapon in general. But you know what? {betleH}
really IS derived from {batlh'etlh}: it has a history and an etymology.
It's not the same word, but that's probably why it's one of those rare
polysyllabic roots. {HoSghaj} is obviously a compound verb (not that verb
compounding is productive, but it's pretty plain where it came from). I
can't explain everything, of course, but he was THINKING when he made many
of those words up. Sigh.
~mark
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