tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 22 12:37:12 2007
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
{'atlhqam} - a double pun?
- From: Steven Boozer <[email protected]>
- Subject: {'atlhqam} - a double pun?
- Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:35:27 -0600
We recognized right away that {'atlhqam} "type of fungus" (n.), which was
described in KGT (p.92):
One way to bring fermentation about is to mix the food with
a fungus (known as {'atlhqam}) usually scraped off the bottom
of certain animals' feet, though it also grows on trees.
was a pun on the English "athlete's foot", but this weekend I stumbled upon
the (Mexican?) Spanish word *huitlacoche* "an edible black fungus that
infects corn". Notice that it contains the Nahuatl consonant /tl/ - a
close analog to Klingon /tlh/ - as well as the fact that the fungus is
edible. Okrand of course speaks Spanish.
Have we seen any other examples of double, bilingual puns by Okrand?
P.S. In fact, most of the materials for Okrand's 1997 Ph.D. dissertation
on Mutsun - an extinct Amerindian language of the Costanoan group spoken in
the San Francisco Bay region - were in Spanish. For those interested,
there's an online article ("Is Klingon an Ohlonean language? A comparison
of Mutsun and Klingon") by Dick Grune available at
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/Summaries/Languages/MutsunKlingonComparison.pdf
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons