[tlhIngan Hol] Is Star Trek: Discovery a new canon category?

nIqolay Q niqolay0 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 10 12:22:43 PDT 2017


The main questions for me are
1) To what extent does Qov work with Okrand? We know he (probably) made
some new words for her. Does she also ask him for clarification on words
with vague definitions or ones that haven't been used before?

2) What does Marc Okrand think?

Given that potentially a lot of aspiring Klingonists are going to start
from seeing the language used in DSC, it might be best to not discount it
entirely. No sense in telling people "Yeah, that stuff you liked so much?
It technically doesn't count."

If you think about it, though, this sort of thing has already happened and
it turned out fine. After all, a lot of what we call {no' Hol} (and for
that matter, the original appearance of Klingon in ST:TMP) was originally
written for the shows and movies by people who aren't Okrand, as either
gibberish or well-meaning-but-lousy attempts at translation. Only later was
it canonically retconned into being legitimate, though possibly from
another time or dialect. Okrand seems to value making sure that every bit
of Klingon shown on film is Real Klingon, even when he doesn't really have
to. Qov's Klingon (Qovngon?) is the same sort of thing, except Okrand
probably won't have to put as much effort into fitting her lines into
existing canon. I mean, she's probably not going to make any mistakes on
the level of {wIj jup}...

In the end, I'll stick with whatever interpretation the KLI list ends up
going with. But until then, my argument is this: even if Qov's lines
weren't vetted by Okrand when she wrote them, he'll probably either sign
off on them as-is eventually or have Maltz explain some difference between
modern Klingon and what gets said on DSC. So if someone thinks of Qov's
lines as "canon in some way eventually, even if we can't generalize from it
yet", I don't think there's going to be huge issues.

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 2:17 PM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:

> We know that Okrand wasn't directly involved in Star Trek: Discovery,
> but that the production team went to great lengths and worked with Qov
> to make the dialogue properly Okrandian Klingon. We haven't seen the
> result, and maybe some things were edited in post-production and have
> to be retrofitted (like with the movies).
>
> My question is, would you consider the Klingon dialogue, etc., in Star
> Trek: Discovery to be Okrandian canon?
>
> These are the categories of Okrand-related canon that I can think of:
>
> 1. Things Okrand wrote or said himself (the books, tapes, interviews
> in HolQeD, reveals at the qep'a' and qepHom'a')
> 2. Things done by Klingonists in which Okrand had major involvement
> (paq'batlh... anything else in this category?)
> 3. Things done by Klingonists in which Okrand had some involvement
> (I'm not sure the extent of his involvement in Klingon Christmas
> Carol? Maybe that belongs in category #2?... TalkNow! Klingon,
> Festival of the Spoken Nerd)
> 4. Things done by non-Klingonists but licensed by Paramount/CBS (Keith
> R.A. DeCandido and a few other authors, the Haynes BoP book)
> 5. Things done by Klingonists with minimal involvement from Okrand but
> licensed by Paramount/CBS (Star Trek: Discovery)
>
> I guess maybe Star Trek: Discovery is similar to category #3, but it's
> still in its own category because it's on a STAR TREK TV SHOW, and
> thus (especially to the world outside of Klingonists) more "official".
>
> Are people going to accept sentences from Star Trek: Discovery as
> canonical Klingon? (For example, no objection if I use sentences from
> the show as examples in {boQwI'}?)
>
> --
> De'vID
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>
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