tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Dec 09 10:17:33 1993

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Re: Qubghachmey



On Dec 9,  3:43am, Peter Garza wrote:
...
> I was fully expecting a hearty fire roasting the "For He's a Jolly
> Good Fellow" on last week's STTNG.  Did no one record it, or has
> everyone just kinda given up on STTNG attempts at Klingon?

     I watched it, listening for anything that immediately sounded like
Klingon words and was not inspired to either insist that my friend tolerate
me rewinding it then, or to go back to it later. The reputation of the show
is so bad that I rarely feel inspired to even attempt translation. The movies
are much better, and as yet I have not had time to fully explore THEM. I did
translate ST1 and most of ST3 for an article for HolQeD, but the original for
ST1 was lost both by HolQeD and myself and the one for ST3 was written as a
follow-up article, so now I feel like I have to go back and rewrite the first
article.

     My attempt was less to simply translate it than to try to historically
recreate each line in the context of Okrand's creation of the language. ST1
was a bunch of sounds made up by an actor, (most of which were variations on
the syllable "cha") arbitrarily assigned to subtitles, but Okrand turned all
these sounds into words now in TKD, so I went back and figured out which were
the sounds Okrand borrowed from the lines and which ones he made up and added
in, with comments on things like tongue position and the fake teeth the actor
was wearing.

     For ST3, I mapped the syllables of the English the actress portraying
Valkris was really saying with the Klingon that was later dubbed in, and
pointed out how some of the strange Klingon grammatical constructions appear
to have been generated in order to justify Klingon sentences that had
entirely too many syllables in them to cover the original meaning, but which
HAD to have that many syllables in them in order to map to the English lip
movements. Most of those constructions do not appear anywhere else in cannon.

     So if you want to work on the TNG cannon, go for it. I do not discourage
anyone from dissecting those examples. I personally prefer to work with what
I expect to be better examples in the movies. Probably in January, I will
find the time to go back and rewrite the two articles for HolQeD, so if you
have an interest in that sort of thing, that material should become available
soon thereafter.

--   charghwI'



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