tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 17 08:50:04 1998

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Re: DS9: Once More into the Breach



On Tue, 17 Nov 1998 06:05:34 -0800 (PST) "Rose, Thornton 
(Atlanta)" <[email protected]> wrote:

> nuq 'oH <DAH KHAR (sp?)> pIn'a''e'? Sov vay'? <CHAH-VAY> mugh je vay'?
> 
> What is a "DAH KHAR" (sp?) master? Does anyone know? Also, did anyone 
> translate "CHAH-VAY"?
> 
> ~ Thornton

If you ever get good at "translating" what you hear on the TV 
shows, you should start translating Dr. Bronner bottles. I'm 
sure there's some Klingon hidden there, too.

The TV shows spew gibberish. Deal with it. It is not the case 
that they are saying Klingon stuff and we are not understanding 
it. THE TV WRITERS DON'T KNOW ANY KLINGON! THE ACTORS DON'T KNOW 
ANY KLINGON! THE DIRECTORS DON'T KNOW ANY KLINGON! FOR ALL WE 
KNOW, THEY COULD BE SPEAKING MADARIN CHINESE!

I can assure you that whatever they are saying is at least as 
close to Mandarin Chinese as it is to tlhIngan Hol.

Okay?

It is a pile of syllables made up by someone who doesn't give a 
damn about the language studied here on this list. So there is 
no such thing as "translating" this crap.

You can arbitrarily assign it some new meaning because it has no 
established meaning.

If you want to study tlhIngan Hol spoken by actors, rent the 
movies. ST3 (Search for Spock) is an especially good example. 
ST5 (the one that Shatner directed) has some especially BAD 
examples of Klingon, but the vocabulary is all valid). ST6 (The 
Undiscovered Country) has some good Klingon in it, plus some 
garbled syllables none of us have been able to figure out.

Then there are the audio tapes with Okrand, and the books. 
Conversational Klingon, Power Klingon, The Klingon Way, Klingon 
for the Galactic Traveler, the Klingon CD. All these are 
worthwhile.

The only time you'll find Klingon words on the TV show is when 
Okrand decides that a gibberish word they say there is 
interesting enough that he adds it to subsequent publications, 
like {parmaq}, which was not really a Klingon word until Okrand 
put it in KGT.

Please don't waste your time and our bandwidth straining to get 
meaning out of the random syllables actors make when supposedly 
speaking Klingon on the TV shows.

charghwI' 'utlh



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