[Tlhingan-hol] Religious terminology

[lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh]

When I discovered that I was probably “part Cherokee”, I started studying some of the history and heritage of “my people”. (Never mind that most of “my people” came from England on some of the earliest sailing ships to cross The Pond — as one relative put it, {naDev pawmeH bIQDujmey wa’DIch lo’be’bogh no’maj’e’ qIHmeH naDev choHpu’.} “Those of us who didn’t come over on the first boats were already here to meet them."

Cherokee proved to be a very difficult language for Europeans to learn. Traders typically managed to do business without a lot of communication. The missionaries were, of course, the first to try to actually learn the language, with the specific intent to create converts and save savage souls (with no interest whatsoever in understanding Cherokee culture and no belief that the Cherokee could possibly have any worthwhile wisdom or knowledge of their own — despite thousands of years of direct representative government, agriculture that was advanced for the time, The Green Corn Ceremony that involved what is an emotional tradition of forgiveness the world could STILL learn from, and a tradition of burying a person’s material things with them specifically to avoid fighting over inheritance, and other traditions worth learning from).

One of the biggest problems the missionaries encountered was that Cherokee lacked any words for “God”, “heaven”, “hell”, etc. and furthermore the people had no previous equivalent concepts to refer to. They were starting from scratch. And this was with a people, many of whom were quite interested and willing to learn the ways of white culture. The Cherokee were one of the five “civilized” tribes, so named because of their willingness to comply with European demands and their attempts to live like white people, even to the point of eventually building plantations and buying slaves — an alien concept they would have found repugnant until they learned otherwise from their conquerers.

That didn’t save them from The Removal, a.k.a. the Trail of Tears, which cost them roughly 1/4 of their population (mostly infants, children, and old people), and placed them in a position of disadvantage from which many have never recovered.

Cherokee rur tlhInganpu’ ‘e’ DaHar’a’?

lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
Door Repair Guy, Retired Honorably



> On Nov 29, 2015, at 3:29 PM, Robyn Stewart <robyn at flyingstart.ca> wrote:
> 
> Explain in any language what those things mean, as if you are explaining to
> someone who completely lacks the concept, and then translate the result to
> Klingon.
> 
> Does bless mean:
> 
> - give the protection of God?
> - approve?
> - use a word on behalf of in order to protect from evil?
> - anoint with special water?
> 
> What is a saint?
> I think it is a person who died, but is remembered because he or she is
> special to God. Is that right? If not, explain better.
> 
> And so on. Always ask "What does it mean?"  Every time you encounter a word
> that you cannot translate into Klingon, tell me in Klingon what that word
> means. If you can discuss something in English, you know a lot of words that
> pertain to that thing. If you can discuss it in Klingon, you know the
> essence of that thing.
> 
> Possibly the Klingon just says lalDanchajvaD potlh, the way settlers do in
> my country when something pertains to native spirituality, and we don't have
> the cultural referents to connect.
> 
> - Qov
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: qunnoQ HoD [mailto:mihkoun at gmail.com] 
> Sent: November 29, 2015 3:32
> To: tlhIngan Hol mailing list
> Subject: [Tlhingan-hol] Religious terminology
> 
> I've been trying in vain,to find ways to express the following words in
> Klingon :
> 
> bless (v)
> saint (n)
> sacred,to be sacred
> holy,to be holy
> 
> Does anyone have any ideas ?
> 
> qun HoD
> 
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