tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Dec 05 04:41:27 1996
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RE: greetings
- From: [email protected] (Alan Anderson)
- Subject: RE: greetings
- Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 07:41:45 -0500
>> No! Klingon has only one greeting (this is a fact): {nuqneH}.
Andrew 'Ska' Netherton writes:
> I find this rather hard to believe. It's like saying
>English-speaking humans only greet each other with "Hello"! I seriously
>doubt that a shoemaker would see the High Council walking past and
>jauntily shout <nuqneH!>
I share your doubt. In fact, I take it to a higher level. I doubt that
a shoemaker would casually greet the High Council at all unless he wanted
to discuss something. Perhaps he would salute. Perhaps he would merely
nod at the members he approved of and ignore the ones he disliked. But I
don't think he would say anything to get their attention unless he really
wanted that attention.
> At the very least, Klingons have honour, and
>treat those who have it with more. This leads me to believe that there
>*must* be some honourific greetings *somewhere*.
Why must one give a greeting in order to be honorable? A plethora of
greetings seems to be something Klingon society simply lacks.
> Maybe the reason we think there's only one is that Maltz was a bit
>bitter about being a Federation prisoner, and used only that one greeting.
>That seems much more likely to me...
TKD and one of the tapes (CK?) both say that there is exactly one greeting:
{nuqneH}. TDK claims to have gotten most of its information from a single
captured Klingon, but the tapes draw on more than Maltz as their source.
> Do we have any Klingon anthropoligists out there who could shed
>some light on this??
That's what Okrand tried to do with The Klingon Way. It's a collection of
statements intended to reflect Klingon virtues.
-- ghunchu'wI'