tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jul 29 13:10:14 2010
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
RE: Klingon dates again
> Kohlar asked the pregnant B'Elanna, "Did you conceive during the holy month of Nay'Poq?" (VOY "Prophecy")
I suppose naypoQ is the month when a woman must be married... ...or perhaps it's nay'poq that's the month when a lot of food tends to go bad ;)
Anyhow, one wonders if Nay'Poq is a part of the regular Klingon calendar, or if it is part of a calendar that holds special significance to Kohlar's people, similar to the Hebrew and Islamic calendars. It's also possible - but perhaps not likely - that a change took place during the approximately 100-year-long period that Kohlar's people were out of touch with the Empire (in 2377, they still didn't know about the Khitomer Accords of 2293).
B'Elanna didn't know whether or not the child had been conceived in the month of Nay'Poq... ...but then, she probably doesn't care much about the Klingon calendar.
Maktag would definitely seem to be a standard Klingon month, as Alexander used it to label his date of birth in an official setting (registering for daycare, unless I'm mistaken).
By the way, is it known if a Klingon minute is sixty Klingon seconds, and a Klingon hour sixty Klingon minutes? That would make sense if they got the concept of minutes and hours from the Federation, but not so much if they developed it on their own.
We learned in Conversational Klingon that "Klingons have adopted the way most civilized planets in the galaxy tell time", which means twenty-four hour days; I'm guessing that this mode has become popular due to the influence of Earth on the Federation, and of the Federation on other parts of the Alpha-Beta hemidsc, and that the Klingons have come to use it in many situtations for that reason.
In one of the "Maltz Online"-articles (HQ 8:1), it's mentioned that they use this system "In dealing with time in interplanetary communication", and specifically they say things like tera' rep wa', meaning "Earth hour one". Presumably, this means that they use Federation seconds, minutes and hours at least in these situations, but it's unclear if they use something else internally (Qo'noS time, for instance).
It's possible that they've made a complete conversion to Federation time, much like many cultures that once had their own units of measurements have converted to the International System of Units.
It's could be like in England, where metric and customary units are used side by side, or it could be like in the U.S.A., where many businesses and government agencies use SI units to facilitate international relations but where most of the citizens mostly use customary units.
It could also be that Federation time is something that upper-class Klingons as a sign of high status, while their troops use Qo'noS time, similar to the case with Federation Standard (English) as it was revealed in the introduction to TKD.
//Felix