[Tlhingan-hol] Eurotalk - New Words - Countries

[De'vID jonpIn]

Lieven:

> > What I like a lot is the word for china. I had to look it up, and there
> you
> > see what you can learn from learning Klingon :-) jungwoq is the chinese
> name
> > for china and means roughly "middle kingdom".
>

Philip Newton:
>
> I liked it, too.
>
> I also wonder whether the name was taken from Cantonese, since there's
> no final consonant in Mandarin.


Were you there when MO spoke about the country names at the qepHom?

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>.)

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".

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.).

-- 
De'vID
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