[Tlhingan-hol] Expressing gratitude

[Will Martin]

The language has the verb {tlho’}, so clearly Klingons CAN say {qatlho’} and here, many speakers have done so. It doesn’t tend to happen a lot.

It would help to know WHERE you read that Klingons don’t say, “Thank you.” I read somewhere that the world is flat. Having something written doesn’t make it true. Show us the authority of the source.

It is true that Klingons don’t say, “Hello,” or “Goodbye”. They don’t have words for that. They basically tend to leave each other alone, unless they have something meaningful to say, and then they just SAY it. They don’t need to just confirm the obvious that “I’m here and you are here and thus, we should say something meaningless in order to establish communication between us,” a.k.a. “Hi”. Or “I’m leaving now, so I need to make you aware of that, just in case you haven’t noticed and perhaps you think our communication is incomplete, I want to make sure to prompt you to finish saying anything you had to say to me before you lose that opportunity,” a.k.a “Goodbye.”

If you walk up to a Klingon as if you were going to say something, but you don’t say anything, he or she will likely become suspicious and say, {nuqneH!}, basically to give you the opportunity to state a reason for him or her to not hit you to make you back off to a more comfortable distance, and if a commander does want to let his troops recognize that he’s finished assigning them a mission and it’s time for them to go off and do it, he’s likely to say {Qapla’!}

Humans seem to have misinterpreted these as normal ways of saying, “Hi,” and “Goodbye.” I guess that’s as close as a typical Klingon gets to saying these things, since it’s more common for a Klingon to express “Hi” by making brief eye contact before either obviously leaving you alone or walking up to you to say something specific and direct. The preferred way of saying, “Goodbye” is to just leave.

But “Thank you,”? I’ve never heard that a Klingon doesn’t say, “Thank you,” when it’s appropriate. Of course, the standards of appropriate timing might be a little different for a Klingon, since honorable behavior is simply expected, and many of the things that a human might thank someone for is, for a Klingon, simply a matter of doing one’s duty as an honorable person.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Nov 13, 2015, at 8:55 AM, qunnoQ HoD <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I recently read that klingons do not say "thank you". So I wonder.. What does a Klingon say to express gratitude ?
> 
> What would he/she say in the place of "thank you" ?
> 
> cpt qunnoQ
> 
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