tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Dec 17 20:53:46 1997
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*tlhIng?
ghunchu'wI' wrote:
|Sometimes we see in the dictionary an apparent compound noun made from
|the name of a planet or region plus the word {ngan} "inhabitant".
|When the name ends with the letter {n}, it looks like it gets dropped.
|For example:
| {vulqan} "Vulcan (planet)", {vulqangan} "Vulcan (person)"
| {'orghen} "Organia", {'orghengan} "Organian".
|But, as Qov said before she listed what she called "empirical parsing
|rules" for syllables, this is *not* really a "rule". It is merely an
|observation. (Even if we had more than a couple of examples of this,
|and no counterexamples, we still couldn't reliably apply it backwards
|to infer that {verengan} "Ferengi" means that Ferenginar, the Ferengi
|homeworld, is called {veren} in Klingon.)
Or just possibly {*vereng}. Others (including myself) have speculated that
another example of this elision is {tlhIngan}:
tlhIngan <-- *tlhIng+ngan
which assumes {*tlhIng} as an unattested place name for a district or city
on Qo'noS. (Perhaps Kahless' followers - the first Klingons - were based
in Kling and the name was gradually extended to the new honor-based
civilization he created as he united the Homeworld, much like the Roman
empire grew from the small town of Rome on Earth.)
Or almost unattested... In the first season TNG episode "Heart of Glory,"
the renegade Korris sneered at "the traitors of Kling" who had betrayed the
Klingon race by making peace with the Federation. As I understand it, at
the time the episode was written "Kling" was intended as the name of the
Klingon homeworld. Once filmed, however, TPTB at Paramount felt it sounded
silly, so later scripts simply referred to "the Homeworld." We only learned
it's true name Qo'noS (Kronos) in ST6, later officially confirmed in "The
House of Quark."
Another hint comes from Michael Jan Friedman's small "Federation Travel
Guide" (1997) which states that "Kling" is the capital city on Qo'noS,
otherwise known in TNG as "the First City." Normally this type of Pocket
Book publication wouldn't be evidence, except that Marc Okrand also
contributed a "key phrase" every tourist should know to the 4-page section
on Qo'noS:
tajwIj 'oHbe' chorlIj jeqbogh Dochvetlh'e'.
That is not my dagger protruding from your midsection.
raising the value of this as a reliable source just a notch. None of which
confirms my suspicion about {tlhIngan}, of course, but it's fun to
speculate based on virtually no evidence. ;-)
BTW, there were a couple of other interesting bits in Friedman's booklet
(such as *racht* being a larger variety of serpent worm), but not enough to
warrant purchasing it. Perhaps someone who did could post these factoids
-- off list if you prefer.
Voragh