tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Dec 22 08:27:41 1994

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Re: vay' and lu'

According to David E G Sturm:
> 
> Have you guys considered the fact that Marc Okrand had to create a lot of 
> Klingon *after* the English version was *filmed*.  I can't remember if 
> that wasn't the case with the early scene in ST3 with >Qugh< and >valQIS<.

All of Valkris's lines were filmed in English saying exactly
what the subtitles say she was saying. You can tell by renting
the video and turning off the sound while reading her lips. Her
Klingon lines were written to sort of match her lip movements
while sort of being valid spoken Klingon. It was a compromise
in both areas, but an impressive one, all the same.

It was cheaper to have the actress dub in the Klingon lines
afterward than it would have been to rebuild the set, put
everybody back in costume and makeup. In this case, "backfit"
meant he had to make up Klingon sounds that matched existing
lip movements and could be twisted into grammar stating what
the subtitle said.

All of Kruge's spoken Klingon lines were filmed while he
actually spoke Klingon. When they have a scene "together",
that's actually scenes filmed separately and combined. They
are, after all, speaking to each other via viewscreen. 

> That might explain the origin of >-lu'<.  Lawrence will have to ask Marc 
> sometime if he can point out what textual material is a retrofit. 

{batlh Daqaw'lu'taH} is the only {-lu'} example and it was
spoken by Kruge. It was not a backfit. Besides, the lip
movements do not NEARLY match, "You will be remembered with
honor."

> (I 
> believe Marc has mentioned a number of lines already where this was the 
> case.  I know there are one or two interviews in >HolQeD< mentioning this.)  
> Something like what we know happened when lines got inadvertently 
> switched, and now >qama'pu'< is both a sentence, and "the prisoners".

Apparently, the line was supposed to be {qama'pu' jonta' neH},
meaning, "I told you, 'Engines only.'" but the director
realized after filming it that nobody had explained WHY he
wanted to target only the engines, so he wanted to add the
line, "I wanted prisoners!" Unfortunately, they had already
torn down the sets and sent the extras away, so they took two
different takes of Lloyd saying the same line and gave the same
line two different subtitles. I believe that Lloyd made a
slight error in one of the two takes, thereby making them
different. I think he forgot {qama'pu'} in the take that they
chose for "I told you, engines only," so the line actually just
says {jonta' neH}, while it is subtitled "I told you, 'Target
engines only!'"

In this case, "backfit" meant that Okrand had to take existing
Klingon sentences and justify them in the dictionary by making
{qama'pu'} mean "prisoners", {jonta'} had to be both the noun
for "engines" and a verb meaning "capture", and {neH} had to be
both the verb for "want" (for a sentence as object construction
WITHOUT {'e'}) and a special adverbial for "only". Since the
only plural suffix he had at the time was {-mey}, if qama'pu'
was to mean "prisoners", he had to invent the whole {-mey,
-pu', -Du'} business to explain why a verbal perfective suffix
would make such a noun plural.

How the verb {ma'} came to mean "accommodate" instead of
"order/command/tell" is something only Okrand knows for sure,
but it definitely seems that Okrand "accommodated" the needs of
the director as much here as any other place in canon.

> Dave.
> 
> <[email protected]>     >tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh'a'?<  "Pardon me, but if I must
> David E G Sturm, Laboratory Manager                operate in a vacuum, can
> Wake Forest University Department of Physics       I at least have a little
> Box 7261 Reynolda Station, Winston-Salem NC 27109  ether to calm my nerves?"

charghwI'
-- 

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