tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Aug 20 13:33:48 1999

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vIychorgh, and some questions

I found yet another of Mr. Okrand's Klingon word puns (well, someone probly 
found it already, but I'm gonna mention it anyway.)

In KGT, in the food section, he describes a marinade made of vegetable 
juices, called vIychorgh (I think it also means sap.) chorgh is Klingon for 
8. So, translated, it would be vIy-8, or V-8, which happens to be a 
health-type drink "made from 8 different vegetables!" (I'm not quite sure 
what they are.)

Oh, and a couple of questions:
1. How exactly did Mr. Okrand get the job to invent Klingon? Was there some 
sort of audition ("All right, when I call your name, come forward and say a 
few lines in your language.") or was he a friend of someone at Paramount 
("Hey, Marc. It's me, Bob. You've studied linguistics, right? Good. We need 
some help up here with an alien language. No, I'm not kidding.") How did 
this work?

2. Why did Paramount feel it was necessary to make Klingon sound like you 
were about to cough up something? (It does, really! Especially that darn 
"Q".) Why not, say, one of those clicking-type languages? (I do remember 
reading there were at least five different sounds classified as clicks, 
including one that sounded like a kissing noise. Maybe that's why.)

3. I remember reading a Klingon sentence, and some of the nouns had the 
suffix -poH. Did I miss something new, or did the guy who wrote it just mess 
up?

4. Also, I was looking at the KLI site, and I was looking at the page where 
the results of some wordplay contests are listed. One of them was "The Great 
Affix Contest" - "Simply compose the longest, meaningful three word sentence 
possible." Well, the runner up sentence (by Will Martin), which was

be'HomDu'na'wIjtIq'a'Du'na'vaD ghureghqangqa'moHlaHqu'be'taH'a' 
Somraw'a'meyna'wIj'e' (I'm not going to translate, the translation is at the 
site.)

looks like he put some N-N possessive constructions together as one word. Is 
this legal, or is that the reason he's runner up and not winner?

5. Why did Mr. Okrand publish the dictionary? I'm sure he would have kept a 
list of his words and stuff, so he could look them up in case Paramount ever 
needed some more lines in Klingon, but why did he publish it so everybody 
else could?

6. I'm sure this doesn't get brought up much, but how come the only curse 
words are for name-calling ("You jerk!") and interjections ("Darnit!") Why 
none for things? Or would we use jay' and say "Dochvam QIp vImuS jay'" - "I 
hate this stupid piece of crud!"
(Actually, it would probly be translated by something other than "crud", but 
you get the idea. Oh, and can you use the name-calling ones as interjections 
too?)


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