[tlhIngan Hol] mu' chu' chabal tetlh!

Rhona Fenwick qeslagh at hotmail.com
Tue Mar 21 09:45:53 PDT 2017


ghItlhpu' SuStel, jatlh:

> A kiss is not a bite. People saying chop as an equivalent to kiss drive me crazy.


Though it's of course not a one-to-one equivalent, Marc was the one who first used it.


HIchop, bang.

"Give us a kiss, love." (Radio Times)


Clearly it's a rendition of the cultural meaning rather than the physical action, but it does show that Klingons probably don't kiss as a sign of romantic affection.


taH:

> I don't like hearing fan over-generalizations of what they've seen on screen to

> every aspect of a Klingon's life.


Please don't assume my motivations.


taH:

> There was a great cover of HolQeD, my favorite cover, showing a Klingon man

> holding a Klingon baby very close and looking down at it tenderly. Go ahead and

> tell me that no Klingon would ever do that, or that no Klingon doing that would

> ever press their lips to the baby.

> Or is everyone thoughtlessly equating kissing with a sexual or romantic act?


Firstly, yes, a Klingon might well press their lips to a baby - but I don't think a Klingon would press their lips to a baby in a regular and culturally constituted way that would justify developing a specific and dedicated verb for pressing their lips to something. That's the distinction. The closest I'd get to agreeing with you here is that a Klingon would certainly nuzzle some part of their head to the baby's. And if anything, in this context I think a Klingon would probably press their *forehead* to the baby. We do know from canon that the forehead is a potent symbol of heritage and of family for Klingons (KGT 28-29, and the curse Hab SoSlI' Quch "your mother has a smooth forehead" from PK), and that festive occasions are times that bring warriors to butt foreheads to show camaraderie (KGT 157-158). And have you ever seen the Inuit kunik or Māori hongi, methods of greeting and showing affection that are performed by pressing noses together rather than lips? The assumption that the lips are a unique and universal site of expressing even non-sexual physical affection is not just a human-centric, but an ethnocentric one and one that, in the absence of any evidence, I don't believe we can fairly make about Klingons either.


Secondly, my discussion with naHQun was predicated on the fact that I happen to know they're doing a Klingon translation of the Kama Sutra, and what I said was intended within that context. So *in that specific context*, yes, sexual, romantic, and physical were the primary topics at play, but it was not at all thoughtlessly and even there I certainly didn't intend that to be the only context within which the Klingon renditions chop, rem, and wuS HotmoH might be used, or indeed that any of those three were in some way interchangeable. Maybe Klingons have a verb for "kiss in platonic or familial affection" that we don't know. But the Radio Times translation indicates that even if they do, they probably don't care for doing it in parmaq.


QeS 'utlh
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