[Tlhingan-hol] rup

[Will Martin]

The backstory on this is less romantic, but more interesting than you might have expected.

One of the challenges Marc Okrand has had is that sometimes circumstances press HIM to make changes in the language. He’s long tried to make sure that anyone who learns the language should be able to go to a movie where someone speaks the language and understand what that person is saying.

But movie making sometimes involves decisions that involve using scenes differently than they were expected to be used in the movie. In one case, in one of the very first scripts, the actor had a line which Okrand translated properly according to the vocabulary and grammar that he had developed at that time. The scene was shot, and then later, the director changed the subtitle, making the line mean something completely different.

The line had a now-disappeared verb {ma’}, with it’s prefix {qa-} and what was at the time a past tense suffix {-pu’}. The word was {qama’pu’}. But the new meaning forced that word to mean “prisoners”. He has subsequently made the verb {ma’} mean “accommodate”, which is apparently what he had to do to satisfy his director. And the word {qama’} became “prisoner”. But he had already used the plural suffix {-mey} in other lines, so he had to come up for some reason to have two different plural suffixes…

Since then, Klingon lost tense, gained {-pu’} as the perfective, and we have gendered nouns (with gender boundaries being intentionally alien to human languages, but consistent within the movies and television shows that use the language.

There’s a similar story behind the verb {qar’a’} used to create a question. The scene was shot in English and he had to add words to keep the actor’s lips moving when it was dubbed into Klingon…

In the early days, this kind of thing happened a lot.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Nov 12, 2015, at 1:25 PM, Fatairae <fatairae at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> All of which is a fascinating insight into the culture that spawned the culture.  Is the gender a relic of ancient usage? Or an explicit statement of subjective opinion by the speaker?
>  To use a couple Terran languages as references (since what are our brains, but giant categorizing machines):
>  In English (through old English), we have relics of the gender system, though only recognizable as such in plurals (wolf/wolves vs mouse/mice).  We don't think of these as "categories" of words.  A similar example (in many of the Indo-European languages) is the disjoint between the feminine gender, and what is actually female. If I remember correctly, the old English "wif" (wife) is masculine.  Tamilian has a completely different system (similar to Klingon actually), where by all sentient things get one gender, and everything else goes in the other.
> 
>  So, the question becomes one of philosophy or grammar?  Is it a hardcoded system, wherein it sounds as wrong as "mouses", or is it an active "philosophical" choice on the part of the speaker to make a statement about the subject?  To say "I acknowledge speaking", on the part of the target; and thus its import is specific to the subjective opinion of the speaker?
> 
> None of which is solved by "canon", but fun to hash out the concepts from what we have anyway hehe.
> 
> 
> On Nov 12, 2015, at 10:50, Will Martin <lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> When Okrand tells us that Klingon gender is determined by the ability to use language, I don’t think this is code words for “has a soul”. I take him at his word. As a class of nouns, is this an example of a being capable of using language? If someone speaks of {targhpu’wIj}, I probably would not be able to stop myself from responding, {toH, pIj boja'chuq’a' targhmeylIj SoH je? boja’chuqtaHvIS nuq bop jatlhtaHghachraj?}
> 
> 
> 
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