[Tlhingan-hol] Puns!

[De'vID]

On 3 November 2015 at 06:31, Anthony Appleyard
<a.appleyard at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Not a pun, but a suspected history, of the word {betleH}:-
>
> The Star Trek scriptwriters invented the bat'telh weapon and its name. Later, Marc Okrand found the weapon and its name already invented, and needed to adapt the name to his tlhIngan Hol. At first he thought to call it an "honor sword" and made the word into the 2 words {{batlh 'etlh}}, and those 2 words remain in separate use. But he later saw that weapon was very diffferent from a sword, and thought again, and invented the word {betleH}.

It's the other way around. {batlh} and {'etlh} were already in TKD to
begin with. When Ronald D. Moore co-wrote the TNG episode Reunion, he
wanted to call Kahless' blade "the Sword of Honor", which he
translated using TKD as {batlh 'etlh} (or {batlh'etlh}, which was
garbled into {bat'telh} in the printed script). The actors
mispronounced the word consistently as "bat-leth", which Marc Okrand
then retroactively canonised as {betleH}.

Source: the commentary track on the TNG Season 4 set.

See also:
http://klingonska.org/canon/1998-10-20a-news.txt

-- 
De'vID