tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Apr 21 09:03:02 1999

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Klingon names



What do we know about the full form of a Klingon name?  Gleaning bits and pieces from various (and perhaps incompatible) Web pages, my synthesis would look something like this:

<be'etor ja'roD-puqbe' SantaI-DuraS tuq> 
chosen name - patronymic - honorific - line name

B'Etor Daughter of Ja'rod, Santai of the House of Duras 
(SantaI seemed a plausible honorific for B'Etor)

Questions:

1) As a special case, can I get away with this word order and the lack of <bogh>?  Surely, space-age Klingons don't take the time to say <ja'roD puqbe'bogh be'etor 'ej DuraS tuq SantaIbogh>.  The war would be over by the time they finished roll call.

2) The Web pages I've looked at all omit <tuq>.  For brevity's sake it might be convenient to omit <be'> (and <loD>) as well, making the patronymic <ja'roD-puq>, Child of Ja'rod.

3) What about the redundancy of <DuraS ja'roD-puq epetaI-DuraS>?  (My impression is that <thlingan tuqmey> in TNG and DS9 generally took the name of their current head, while the Web creations tend to be persistent family names.)

Again, I apologize if this is already well-trodden ground.

qa'ral




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