tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon May 13 09:56:37 1996
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Re: "Correctness" of new Klingon words
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>Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 05:59:40 -0700
>From: [email protected] (Frank M Truelove)
>"Maybe we should make allowances for Klingons speaking on film and t.v."
>I have a tendency to view Star Trek films and shows as Dramatizations broadcast
>to citizens of the Federation. In other words, these are only representations
>of "real" events. So, in my view, the actors are portraying actors and the
>actors portraying Klingons are human. Thus B'etor's blood being different from
>Chang's -- someone in Federation Entertainments Post-Production made a mistake.
>So, some of the Klingon is merely meant to be representative, not accurate. In
>the same way that some Westerns made in the 70's and 80's used Native American
>actors to portray members of tribes with which they had no affiliation. By the
>way, many of the "representative language snippets" in such films are actually
>very dirty jokes and epithets.
>Still, I very much like the "Hinterland speak" and the loanwords theories.
I tend to like the "representation" view, since after all, it IS a
representation. I might buy the "other Klingon languages" explanation, but
not the "modern slang" or "hinterland speak" or "language development"
claims. It's true that languages change and new words are
introduced... But they're introduced by people who know the language into
which they are entering, not by script-writers with a misguided perception
of what the language is like. Words have entered English in the past few
centuries... words like "*sluck" or "tribble" or "florp" or "zorch".
Not words like "Qorpm" (Klingon Q) or "mpabn" or "vsatl". Words that
conform to what people find pronounceable in the target language. So I
would NOT expect Klingon neologisms to be heavy in consonant clusters at
the beginnings or ends of syllables, since Klingon doesn't seem to admit
those combinations much. It's harder to demonstrate, since English is a
polysyllabic language, but I also wouldn't expect too many neologisms to be
polysyllabic, since Klingon tends to have monosyllabic roots. Besides,
many of the "examples" don't seem to be really new words (I keep thinking
of Dax and Worf fighting, with her saying "Movek" or whatever to mean "ok,
I give.") The "hinterland speak" and so all all imply that these new words
are part of tlhIngan Hol, developed somehow naturally, which seems strange
to me. If you want to consider things like Klingonaase as an unrelated
language also spoken on Qo'noS, that makes sense (though maybe not by the
previous emperor; MO spoke of *dialect* changes, not changes to totally
unrelated languages. It would be like if a British monarch happened to
assume the crown of Austria (they're all related anyway) and said "OK,
German's out; English now. " It's been done, but rarely successfully.)
~mark
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