[Tlhingan-hol] wovmoHbogh jan

[Alan Anderson]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 2:22 PM, lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh
<lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that so long as the entry notes the source, there’s nothing wrong with including this sort of phrase as an entry. It helps in lookup, since the phrase in Klingon has a single word in English, or refers to a single item or concept which may or may not require more than one word in either language.

The source is a big part of my reluctance to entertain {wovmoHbogh
jan} as a phrase worthy of inclusion in the KLI's New Word List. It
hasn't appeared in any work besides the Hallmark commercial for the
Bird of Prey ornament. And that appearance was actually {Qapqu'
wovmoHbogh janHommey}, subtitled "It even has working lights!" The
sentence is phrased completely differently in the two languages.
Almost all of the Klingon spoken in the commercial is well-formed and
seems natural, and only one line of it is even close to a literal
match for the similarly well-formed and natural English in the
subtitles.

In his startrek.klingon newsgroup post of 18 June 1997, Marc Okrand
had this to say about the line:

> ...Though the Klingons in the ad may have ad libbed
> a bit, the phrase the one Klingon was supposed to say regarding the
> little lights in the Bird of Prey ornament was {wovmoHbogh janHommey}.
> That is, "little devices that cause (something) to be light or bright"
> or "little devices that brighten (something)" or "little devices that
> light (something) up" or the like. {wov} is a verb "be light, bright"
> followed by the suffix {-moH} "cause" (thus, "cause to be light").

My opinion remains that it's not a literal translation, nor is
{wovmoHbogh janHommey} a set idiomatic translation for "lights", and
it doesn't belong in a dictionary as if it were. It's great to have
the transcript of the commercial in a database of canon -- but that's
not what the NWL is.

-- ghunchu'wI'