tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 11 19:37:10 2004

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Re: pizza

De'vID jonwI' ([email protected]) 

Karen L Wood:
>>Klingon name for pizza????  LMAO  (sorry!)

SuStel:
>At a qep'a' a few years ago, we asked Marc Okrand about this, and he said 
>that {chab} would work for this.  The word means any baked bread or crust 
>sort of food.  So, doughnuts are {chab}, turnovers are {chab}, and pizza is 
>{chab}.  Mince pie would be {chab}.  Bagels are {chab}.
>
>This word is only a very broad category of food.  If you declare {chab 
>vIneH!}, no one's going to know what you want.  You still need to identify 
>what sort of {chab} you want.  So say {pizza vIneH}.

If a pizza is a kind of {chab}, and Klingons were to adopt the
Terran word for it, might they add the word {chab} to it, i.e.
call it a {pizza chab} instead of merely a {pizza}?  I raise
this possibility because I've noticed a similarity between
Klingon and Chinese in the way that they attach classifying
words to things.  For example, whereas in English it's not
clear that "French", "German", "English", and "Chinese" are all
names of languages, in Klingon all languages end in {Hol},
e.g. {DIvI' Hol}, {tlhIngan Hol}, {vulqan Hol}, etc.  Chinese
is similar in that languages end in "wen" (language).  Similarly,
when talking about people, there's nothing special to mark out
types of people in English, but in Klingon the words end in
{ngan}, e.g. {tlhIngan}, {tera'ngan}, {vulqanngan}, etc.  (Well
there's {Human} but that's clearly a borrowed word.)  In Chinese
the words for different nationalities end in "ren" (the word
for person).  In terms of food, in Chinese, names for kinds of
noodles always end in "mien" (the word for noodle), the names
of kinds of rice end in "fan", etc.  But in English, there's not
necessarily a relationship between a word and the type of thing
the word denotes.  I'm not saying that Klingon is closer to
Chinese than to English in this regard, and in fact we don't know.
I'm just pointing out it might be a kind of English (Anglophone) prejudice
to assume that Klingon acts like English when it borrows a
foreign word as opposed to, say, Chinese.  I would've said
{pizza chab vIneH}, but then, I'm biased in that direction because
my mother tongue is (Cantonese) Chinese.  Of course the first
language of most of the people involved with Klingon is English
and the Trek writers were writing for an Anglophone audience
when they made up the "exotic"-sounding Klingon food names.

There's no (Cantonese) Chinese word for "pizza", of course,
and whenever we talk about "pizza" we use the English word.
I've heard the older generation use a Chinese word for "pizza"
which means "flat cookie", where "cookie" is a kind of Chinese
pastry that resembles a cookie... in other words, they relate
"pizza" to some Chinese equivalent.  Perhaps Klingons call
"pizza" by {tera'ngan chab}.

--
De'vID

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