tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat May 06 16:44:01 1995

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Re: Choosing a Klingon name

There are several ways that I have seen used:

1) Translate something into tlhIngan Hol.  charghwI' is a prime example 
of such a name.

2) Use a naming convention from the Classic show or FASA.  All the 
Klingons in the old show had names that began with a K, such as Kor, Kang 
and Koloth, or an M, such as Mara.  "The Final Reflection" by John Ford 
and FASA gaming material says that a Klingon will change his name when he 
enters military service to reflect his change into a warrior.  K is for 
the navy, M is for the marines and an A would be for administrative or 
scientific service.

3) Use a naming convention from the movies or the Next Generation.  What 
this really means is anything goes.  Chang, Gorkon, Nu'Doq and a whole 
slew of others don't follow any discernable pattern except that they like 
apostrophies.  A few captains retained the K in earlier TNG episodes or 
Kruge and Klaa from ST3 and ST5.  Also, the Klingons females from those 
movies had V names, Valkris and Vixis.

My own choice relied on choice 2.  The fine tradition of a K sound.  At 
the time I was playing the RPG and other crewmembers had already chosen 
names.  There was Captain Krouton and Commander Kevlar.  A little silly 
but what the hell!  I chose Kordite.  For those who don't know the 
reference, cordite is a gunpowder.  ("I love the smell of Kordite in the 
morning," she said huskily.  "It smells like. . .victory." [an excerpt 
from a story I haven't written yet.])


Anyway, I have a program lying around for the UNIX that is a good name 
generator.  What you do is use a file of names and the program goes 
through and calculates where the frequency of things are.  It then prints 
out a file of things that are similar.  Put in a list of Roman names and 
out comes a list of Roman type names.  Put in Elvish, out comes elvish.  
It even works with text.  Put in Shakespeare and you get gibberish out, 
but it's Shakesperean gibberish.  The only problem is that the list of 
Klingon names would be a touch small and so would not give out a decent 
output.  

If there is any interest I'll see if I can load it off the disk I have 
and upload it to ftp.kli.org.  It's pretty big and I've only got a 2400 
bps modem.  I'm not even sure it still works.

Lt.Cmdr. Kordite
Executive Officer, IKV Dark Justice, Klingon Assault Group

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