[Tlhingan-hol] Puns!

[David Holt]

My guesses are different.

I think for the classic Klingon weapon, the creators of the weapon said, "Let's call it an 'honor sword'. Someone look up how to say that in Klingon!" So they wrote down {batlh'etlh}. Then, either through transcription errors or intentional adjustment, it became "bat'telh" and came to be pronounced "batleth" in the actual episodes. Dr. Okrand then had to accommodate this pronunciation since it was canon and created the word {betleH}.  Looking in the dictionary, you will see that the words {batlh} and {'etlh} both come from the 1st edition portion of TKD, which came out 2 years before TNG, and {betleH} doesn't appear until the addendum, which came out 2 years after we heard the name pronounced.

As for {HoD}, my guess is that he had already developed his capitalization scheme and loved the way it worked so well with H.o.D. that he found a good use for the acronym. But the evidence for that belief is more complicated and less obvious, so who knows.

Jeremy

--- Original Message ---

From: "Anthony Appleyard" <a.appleyard at btinternet.com>
Sent: November 2, 2015 11:32 PM
To: tlhingan-hol at kli.org
Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Puns!


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}.

P.S. Note {HoD} = "captain" // real-world acronym HoD = "head of department"; was that the start of uppercasing some tlhIngan Hol hetters?

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