tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Aug 21 10:22:50 1999
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Re: vIychorgh, and some questions
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: vIychorgh, and some questions
- Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 13:22:01 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
- Priority: NORMAL
On Fri, 20 Aug 1999 13:32:39 PDT Patrick Masterson
<[email protected]> wrote:
> I found yet another of Mr. Okrand's Klingon word puns (well, someone probly
> found it already, but I'm gonna mention it anyway.)
>
> ... vIychorgh
Yes. We knew this.
> 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?
The latter is the case. He happened to be in town setting up
equipment for his day job overseeing captioning live
performances for the deaf. It was for an awards ceremony and
some of the equipment wasn't delivered yet, so he had some extra
time. A friend of his at Paramount invited him to lunch to work
on the Vulcan ceremonial scene in the second movie, Wrath of
Kahn. The scene had already been shot in English, so they asked
him if he could supervise the dubbing in of alien sounds that
would fit those lip movements. (Turn the sound down on that
scene and you can see that she is literally saying exactly what
the subtitles says she is saying.)
They liked the work he did for that scene so much that when they
did the third movie and wanted some Klingon, they hired him.
Instead of making up a few sounds and putting subtitles on them,
he made up a language. The rest is history.
> 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.)
Okrand had exactly two elements already established for the
Klingon language. One was the small set of words established in
the first Star Trek movie when (I'll probably misspell
names here) James Doohan (Scottie) made up sounds for Mark
Leanard (the only actor to play a Klingon, a Vulcan -- Spock's
father Sarak -- AND a Romulan) to say. That established a little
over half the phonemes of the language (not including {Q}) and
Okrand had to come up with more.
The second element was a stage direction in the script saying,
"And then Kruge says, in his gutteral Klingon...". So it had to
be gutteral. I'm sure that's how {Q} happened.
> 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?
Apparently they messed up. There is no such noun suffix. There
is a noun {poH}. I do have in my dictionary the word
"generation" translated as {puq poH}, which someone might have
perhaps mistakenly taken to be a single word instead of a phrase.
> 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
That would be me. Many years ago. I'm better now. Honest.
> 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?
Obviously I screwed up. Badly. I think Lawence was being
charitable, given how many egregious errors there are in each of
those words. Surely something was lost in the transmission.
There is a spelling error there that I'm amazed I would have
made, even as a beginner. Surely, what I meant was a FOUR word
sentence:
be'Hompu'na'wI' tIq'a'Du'na'vaD
ghur'eghqangqa'moHlaHqu'be'taH'a' Somraw''a'meyna'wIj.
"Are my scattered-all-about definite muscles continuously not
extremely able to cause themselves to repeatedly increase for
the benefit of the great, true hearts of my definite girls?"
Of course, I've changed since then. I prefer more mature women
now.
> 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?
Money.
And fun.
> 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?
Who is to say you can't use the derrogatory terms for things?
> Or would we use jay' and say "Dochvam QIp vImuS jay'" - "I
> hate this stupid piece of crud!"
I have called many a device {toDSaH!}. I do work with computers,
after all.
> (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?)
In the heat of the moment, sure. Do you really think anyone is
going to tell an enraged Klingon that he is using the wrong word?
"Umm. Excuse me sir, but I just happened to notice that you
misused an invective.... AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGHHHH! -gasp- THUD."
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