tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 17 14:57:49 1999
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RE: KLBC: Sayings of the Sea
quljIb wrote:
: On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, [Voragh] wrote:
: > *runHa' "be tall (in stature)", literally "unshort" from {run} "be
: > short (in stature)"
:
: One more set of words for the Weights & Measures category.
Note that *{runHa'} is not Okrandian, just something I've seen people use
here on the mailing list. But it works nicely to describe people and maybe
buildings, though I'm not sure whether these are {*runHa'} "tall" or {jen}
"high" in Klingon. Maybe both.
: > Of these, I think {Duj jen} works best here. Looking up from the deck,
the
: > tall masts of a sailing ship seem to soar high up into the sky, which is
: > where the stars you steer her by are. To make this more Klingon, you
might
: > even call them the "naked stars". <g>
:
: jIQochbe'. maj Duj jen. But I'm puzzled. How would calling them "naked
: stars" make the phrase sound "more Klingon"?
Read John Ford's _The Final Reflection_ from the early 1980s, before Star
Trek: The Motion Picture, ST3 and TNG etc. This is a great authorized
pro-novel with an alternative view of fusion-Klingon (i.e. TOS smooth
foreheads) society that introduced another Klingon language - *klingonaase*
- which Ford developed a bit further in Klingon-related modules of the FASA
role-playing game, including a three-volume reference set of booklets on
the Klingon Empire and its starships. FASA later lost their licensing from
Paramount and Paramount eventually decided to add more prosthetics to the
Klingon foreheads and develop their culture in a slightly different
direction. You can often find old copies of the paperback in used book
stores; I think that it may also have been re-printed with a few other
older novels three or four years ago. It's well worth looking for. Many
in Klingon fandom still consider TFR to be the finest Klingon-related Trek
novel ever written.
In the novel, the theme of the "naked stars" is a leitmotiv. This refers
to the Klingon belief that "all things done before the Naked Stars are
remembered". On Ford's version of Klinzhai, the very humid Klingon
homeworld, the skies were hidden by a thick cloud covers most of the year,
so clear nights when the stars were visible were rare. Of course once the
Klingons moved out into space, the naked stars were always visible, but the
sentiment and the proverb remained.
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons