tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 26 11:01:54 1998

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: DS9: Once More into the Breach

From: William H. Martin <[email protected]>

>On Sun, 22 Nov 1998 23:46:55 -0800 (PST) David Trimboli
><[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I'm not quite sure how you come to this conclusion.  The Klingon in Star
>> Trek V is quite good: for the most part, well-pronounced and grammatical.
>
>There are basic flaws in a lot of the Klingon spoken there, like
>placing the conjunction {je} BETWEEN nouns instead of following
>them and such. It does have its share of changed subtitles, like
>the line about space junk not testing the warrior's mettle. I
>have less problems with that, but I did not see that kind of
>blatant error in ST3 as the misplaced conjunction, or the
>jumbled mess about the captain's merits.
>
>> It has about as many errors as the dialogue in Star Trek III.
>
>Care to point out any of those errors?

The problems which occurred in Star Trek III were fixed into "features" of
the language (like the {qama'pu' jonta' neH} bit and Valkris pronouncing
{joH} as {jaw}).  Since Okrand wrote the dictionary AFTER the movie was
made, obviously these features got included into the language.

Other books have come out since Star Trek V, and most or all of the errors
in Star Trek V have gotten the same treatment.  The "warrior's
mettle"/"rescue ship" bit was fixed with vocabulary in the Addendum, the
{wa' tera'ngan je wa' romuluSngan} was explained away in Klingon for the
Galactic Traveler as a common error made by Klingons (it is not an error in
the film—anymore), and so on.

And we have to take these backfits into account, or else what's the point of
"canon"?

>> And in Star
>> Trek VI we only get some mumbled Klingon and quick phrases, and
Christopher
>> Plummer calling out {taH pagh taHbe'}, but the only scene with extended
>> Klingon conversation in it has a lot of unintelligible or badly
pronounced
>> lines.
>
>You mean you didn't understand that line about {wawa wah
>wawawaaaa} as that guy spread the map on the table?

Of course I did!  He said . . . umm . . . yeah, he was talking . . . eh . .
. I mean, isn't it obvious?

SuStel
Stardate 98904.2

Back to archive top level