tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Apr 15 12:35:53 2002

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Re: Waiting For Sublight Speed (was Re: to' nech)




>ja' SuStel:
> >Okrand typically turns English hard "g" into /q/ (e.g., /qagh/ = "gagh").

ghuchu'wI':
>It's the other way around, I think.  The scriptwriters/actors typically
>turn Klingon {q} into "g" (same example).

This may be a Klingon version of "What came first? The chicken or the 
egg?"  Okrand invented the word {ghargh} "serpent, worm" which was used in 
ST3.  The unnamed Klingon sergeant reports back to Kruge upon discovering 
Spock's otherwise empty coffin/torpedo tube crawling with large worm-like 
things on the Genesis Planet in an untranslated line:

   <yajchu'.  ghargh...veQ!> (?)
   [Understood clearly.  Worms...garbage!]

BTW this was the same word Okrand used to translate "Regulan bloodworm" 
{reghuluS 'Iwghargh} from TOS "The Trouble With Tribbles".

The Klingon dish *gakh* was invented by the scriptwriters in, I believe, in 
the first year TNG episode "A Matter of Honor".  As you recall, Riker 
learns to eat live gakh while on an exchange mission on the IKV Pagh, which 
serves as a metaphor for his learning to understand Klingon behavior.  No 
doubt the writers based this on {ghargh} in the first ed. of TKD, but it 
came out as *gakh* in the script.  Okrand then provided the proper tlhIngan 
Hol spelling for the "new" word *gakh* in the Supplement to the second 
edition of TKD, which included vocabulary from ST5, ST6 and the first year 
of TNG.



-- 
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons



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