tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 14 12:15:08 2011
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Eurotalk - New Words - Countries
<div><br></div>Lieven:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im">> What I like a lot is the word for china. I had to look it up, and there you</div>
<div class="im">
> see what you can learn from learning Klingon :-) jungwoq is the chinese name<br>
> for china and means roughly "middle kingdom".<br></div></blockquote><div> </div>Philip Newton:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im">
</div>I liked it, too.<br>
<br>
I also wonder whether the name was taken from Cantonese, since there's<br>
no final consonant in Mandarin.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Were you there when MO spoke about the country names at the qepHom?</div></div><div><br></div><div>MO did not intend anything by the name of Japan, its Klingon meaning is a coincidence. (I suppose it's better that he chose to end the name in <pon> rather than in <Hon>.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>MO did, however, deliberately choose the Cantonese pronunciation for China rather than Mandarin. His reason was that if he had used Mandarin, the name would have ended in <wo'>, and he didn't think Klingons would like to call an Earth country by their word for "empire".</div>
<div><br></div><div>Also, he made up another name for the UK because he'd forgotten that he'd made one up earlier (as someone else had already noted on this mailing list). However, he didn't think this was a problem. He thought maybe when the concept of the "United Kingdom" was explained to two different Klingons, they translated the name in different ways, and the names got sent back to Kronos without anyone realising or caring that they referred to the same thing. Also, he noted that even humans have many names to refer to that region, which all have slightly different meanings (UK, Great Britain, British Isles, England, etc.).</div>
<div><br></div>-- <br>De'vID<br>
_______________________________________________
Tlhingan-hol mailing list
[email protected]
http://stodi.digitalkingdom.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol