tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 17 12:49:19 2007

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Re: Klingon WOTD: Hoqra' (noun)

McArdle ([email protected])



Steven Boozer <[email protected]> wrote:
   
  
>> >>Klingon word: Hoqra'
>> >>Part of Speech: noun
>> >>Definition: tricorder
>
>Voragh:
>> >Never used in canon.
>> >Apparently consists of {Hoq} "expedition" (n.) + {ra'} "order, 
>command" 
>> (v.).
>
>mIq'ey:
>>"Expedition" is a synonym for "trek".  "Trek" + "order" = "tricorder".  
>An 
>>Okrandian pun?
>
>Okrand's usual gloss for "Trek" is {leng} "trip, voyage" as in {Hov 
>leng} 
>"Star Trek":
>
>[snip]
>
>If it is a pun, I suspect it's much older - maybe even going back to 
>Gene 
>Roddenberry himself.  I never saw the connection before, but you could 
>be 
>right.  I always thought it was a contraction of "tri + recorder" and 
>wondered which three things it was recording.
  
I rather suspect that tricorder was in fact "tri" + "recorder".  Neologizing by adding new prefixes to existing words is a Trek tradition going back to the beginning; just with number prefixes alone in TOS, we have, in addition to "tricorder", "dilithium" and "quadrotriticale" (off the top of my head).  I any event, I don't see why the coinage of "tricorder" would involve a pun on "order", since there's no a priori reason to associate that word with the tricorder's function (unless you're reaching for a bilingual pun on the French word for computer, "ordinateur", which seems quite far-fetched to me).
   
  On the other hand, given the word "tricorder", a need to translate it into an invented language, and a mind that can come up with such things as {ghotI'} and {nughI'}, I can see Okrand noticing that embedded "order" and running with it.  Of course, this would be a somewhat more convincing speculation if the word he'd come up with had been {lengra'} instead.
   
  As to which three things it might record, it's not relevant to the question of coinage, but I found it interesting that the Wikipedia article on "tricorder" mentions this:
   
  "A real-world device comparable to the tricorder was developed by a Canadian company called the Vital Technologies Corporation in 1996. The scanner was called the TR-107 Mark 1; Vital Tech. sold 10,000 of them before going out of business. The TR-107 could scan EM radiation, temperature, and barometric pressure."
   
  That is, it sensed three things.
   
  Qavan
   
  mIq'ey
 
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