tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jul 02 13:00:27 1998

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Re: KLBC flower

: ja' Voragh:
: >chal  "beautiful flower which blossoms in the Klingon spring" (Sarek)
: > [...]
: >{chal} appeared in Crispin's novel _Sarek_ (for which Okrand supplied some
: >Klingon).
: 
: I think the novel called it a "chal flower".  That sounds a lot like the
: Terran "sunflower".  It's quite possible that the name of the plant here
: is merely "sky flower", and we still don't know what the complete Klingon
: translation of its name is.
: 
: -- ghunchu'wI'

If that's all Crispin meant, she would have simply said "sky flower" or "sun
blossom", qar'a'?  

I guess you haven't studied many ancient languages--especially those whose
vocabularies and grammars are still being collected and refined (dare I say
{qon}, to tie this to another thread?) from the extant texts like Hittite,
Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, etc.  One often comes across
nouns whose context or the use of ideographic determinatives make clear are
plant names.  The literature is full of (to make up a few): dumuza plants,
'r3w trees, shamillu flowers, letren fruit, qira'Hna wood, etc.  We know how
the word is pronounced (more or less) and what kind of a plant or part of a
plant it is, but yet aren't able to identify it with specific flora of the
region.  

Thus, for me "chal flower" implies {chal} is the name of the flower.  Some
Trek writers do this with food names or weapons, like "racht worms" or
"daggers of kut'luch", which are simply called {raHta'} or {qutluch} in
Klingon.  Using the "flower" label provides a bit more information for the
reader than the word by itself but allows the sci fi or fantasy author to
add an exotic flavor to her writing, without having to be terribly specific
as to what kind of flower it is, what it looks like, whether it's edible,
where it grows, etc.  IIRC "chal flower" appeared in a descriptive line and
wasn't particularly relevent to the plot.  Of course, we'd have to Crispin
to be sure.

Didn't J.M. Friedman do this quite a bit in his novel "Kahless"?

- Voragh

(a lapsed archaeologist who worked his way through graduate school compiling
entries for a Franco-American Ugaritic dictionary project - a Northwest
Semitic language written in alphabetic cuneiform spoken on the northern
Syrian coast during the Late Bronze Age)

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