tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 15 08:47:02 1996

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"Kahless" story book

The author of the story book "Kahless": I wonder how much he <did> read TKD?
He seems to have seen a copy; but his only attempt at self-composed Okrand
Klingon (DIS jajlo' = Dawn Cave) is in the wrong order. All his other examples
of Okrand Klingon are examples taken from TKD. In the preface he mentions a
computer in a way that suggests that he word-processed the story himself: thus
the misreads `l' for 'I' (lowercase ell for uppercase eye) can't be blamed on
his printer. One sign that he has read TKD is `q' in some of his invented
Klingon names. But all his Okrand Klingon is set at Picard's time: in the
matter set in ancient times he only uses the {-mey} suffix, as if he realizes
that tlhIngan Hol might have changed much in 1500 years: which is not certain:
in Kahless's time the ancestors of the English spoke Anglo-Saxon, which is
incomprehensible without learning it; while a modern Lithuanian would have
little trouble being understood in his homeland if time-jumped back 1500 years.

Someone spoke of apostrophe peppering to make spellings look alien. This also
occurs in some Star Trek Vulcan names such as {T'Pau}. But, if the apostrophe
forms such as <p'takh> (= {petaQ}) and <d'k targ> are to be explained within
the Star Trek fictional world, they could be phonetic renderings by Earthmen
of tlhIngan Hol spoken by a Klingon who markedly weakened unaccented vowels.

Re the Kahless book's error {blje...} for {bIje...}: initial clusters like
{BLJE...} are indeed impossible in Klingon, but are routine in some Earth
Scandinavian and Yugoslavian languages that pronounce `j' as {y}: perhaps that
is why he did not realise that that `ell' should have been an `eye'.

Off-topic P.S.: Who out there lives in a German-speaking country and knows
anything about the German language spelling reform that I read about recently?

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