tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Aug 07 23:48:35 1994

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Names in tlhIngan Hol

>From: Heidi Wessman <[email protected]>
>Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 15:23:01 -0600 (MDT)


>Now, I've been wondering about names.  Most of us have Klingon names, but 
>I've never bothered to look them up.  I'd be interested in finding out 
>why everyone chose the names they did.

Before you go wild on that, bear in mind some things.  It's much like the
age-old pastime of looking up what the curses "mean" by taking them apart
into component pieces.  I've seen such thigs in a bunch of languages (often
to demonstrate some sort of "divine origin" of this or that language).
Words don't always have meanings that can be traced from the modern
vocabulary.  The English curse "bloody" has *nothing* to do with blood
(it's a contraction of "By our Lady").   That it's traceable at all is
unusual.  Words like "understand" in English... it's not the opposite of
"oversit"!  And "delight" has nothing to do with making something dark
(de-light).  It's a respelling of a totally unrelated word.  Look up
"mark" all you want in a dictionary; my name is not related to making spots
on things.  Nor is "Cliff" a reference to geographical features, not "Will"
a reference to future time.  Would you expect that "qeylIS" has to do with
adjusting?  OK, "matlh" is probably a meaningful name; that happens as
well.  But "torgh"?  I mean, it's fun to try to invent derivations and all,
but don't put much trust in them.  They're mostly a mental pastime.

>FYI, I chose chuQun because that's what Heidi means in German.

I suppose I should be "ghItlh"? :)

>How about the rest of you?

I occasionally use "Seqram" which has two meanings if you bother to
translate, neither of which are very enlightening.  Reason?  There are/were
no few "Mark"s on this list.  One of them, Mark Mandel, had a pretty neat
handle; he called himself "marqem", from "Mark M." respelled into Klingon.
That seemed pretty cool, so I thought about "Mark S." or "marqeS".  So as
not to be too obvious, I spelled it backwards.  "Seqram".  Yay.

>----------------
>chuQun


~mark

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