tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 24 07:03:34 1996
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Re: some homophonies
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A lot of tlhIngan Hol has felt the effect of backfitting. Some of these
have been discussed in HolQeD. One that I think was discussed but I heard
confirmed and explained at the qep'a' involves some fairly basic features
of tlhIngan Hol.
Apparently, in a movie, Kruge(?) (Christopher Lloyd, I think) commanded his
gunner to fire on a ship and take out the engine section only. The gunner
blasts the ship to smithereens (anyone ever see just one smithereen?), and
the captain says "I told you, engine only!" In Klingon, this was
originally, "qama'pu' jonta' neH!" (ma' being the word for "say" at that
time). Unfortunately, they diddled some dialogue after the shoot, and
used two takes of that same line with different subtitles, forcing a
backfit. The other subtitle was "I wanted to capture prisoners!" Oh
dear. Well, let's see... that means "prisoners" somehow has to be
"qama'pu'"... too long for a word. Must be qama' plus -pu', making -pu' a
plural suffix (Klingon up to this point only had one plural suffix, -mey.
Once -pu' was added, Okrand figured, "Oh, what the hell" and threw in
- -Du'.) "jonta'" had been "engine section" and then refitted to "engine";
now it had to be "captured". jon+ta'. Not sure if this is the origin of
the aspect suffix -ta', but it may be. And neH becomes "want" with some
jigglings of grammar to avoid the 'e' and clipping and all. Before that,
it only meant "only" (interestingly, the original meaning was already the
irregular adverbial neH). And now the word for prisoner is "qama'" (I
guess the pronunciation was such that he could make ra' sound believable
for the other take), which probably should supplant the earlier version,
which was used as an example word all through the dictionary. A global
search-and-replace then changed "yaS" (which used to mean "prisoner") to
"officer" (and I guess that's why we have both yaS and 'utlh). The dangers
of deadlines.
I wasn't/am not sure I should post this letter, for fear it will touch off
various riots about "original" Klingon versus "backfitted", or that it will
come to be misremembered and misquoted to imply that words have changed
their meanings. Let me make it clearer (and since I PGP-sign my outgoing
mail I can be reasonably sure that we can reproduce the whole text of this
letter and prove it's unaltered): all this is NOT meant to imply that
Klingon is in any way changed or different from what is in the dictionary.
This is more on the level of what was going on in the draft notebooks and
Okrand's mind as the language was being developed. Klingon really *is*
what was published, not the myriad snippets of thought that may or may not
have flitted through Dr. Okrand's mind since he was asked to do the project
(who knows how many different layouts he toyed with before coming up with
the one we now have?) "Klingon" never had "yaS" meaning prisoner; that was
only in a temporary thought of Marc's. This stuff is interesting from a
historical standpoint only, and is not meant to indicate anything altered
about tlhIngan Hol.
~mark
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