tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 28 07:15:23 2005

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Re: untranslated Klingon in ST6

Steven Boozer ([email protected])



Quvar:
> >There's still one phrase which I don't understand at all:
> >When gravity is lost, one klingon is flying around, and then a federation
> >man shoots at him. The klingon shouts something like *puqwa'!*
> >(I believe that's the klingon in the court who lost one arm)

Alan:
>I hear "go-KWA", which closely approximates the captioned {ghoQaH} when
>spoken by an insufficiently-coached actor.

When trying to reconstruct Okrand's underlying text you have to remember 
that, unless coached not to do it, actors almost always insert a /W/ sound 
after /q/ and /Q/ since it's almost always followed by this sound in 
English - spelled /U/ at the beginning of syllables:  e.g. quite, quiet, 
quick, quota, query, etc.  Also, since final /H/ is silent in English, most 
untrained actors don't pronounce it in Klingon either.  And the Klingon 
guttural /GH/ is usually just pronounced like a hard /G/ as in ghost.  Thus 
{ghoQaH} becomes /go-KWA/!

Fortunately in ST6, a lot of tlhIngan Hol was simply typed into the 
captions, with a few mis-spellings:  most commonly /g/ for /q/.



--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons






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