[tlhIngan Hol] info from Maltz on the spellings of Gorkon and B'Elanna

[De'vID]

On Tue, 3 Jul 2018 at 10:52, mayqel qunenoS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:

> {ghorqon} {ghorqan} and {beylana} are the proper klingon spellings of the
> respective life-forms, or just their pronunciation ?
>

The Latin-script writing system we use for Klingon is a phonetic
transcription. We don't actually know how to "spell" anything in any native
Klingon writing system.

Presumably, Chancellor Gorkon writes his name like his legendary ancestor,
but whereas the ancestor's name is pronounced {ghorqon}, his is pronounced
more like {ghorqan} (or maybe that's just the way he says it when speaking
to members of the Federation to make it easier on them to pronounce).

Similarly, B'Elanna's name is pronounced like {beylana}. Again, presumably,
it's written in Klingon in a way which a native would pronounce as
{be'elanna}, which is why it has been transliterated into English as
"B'Elanna", but she doesn't pronounce it the way the original name is
pronounced. This is similar to how my name, {De'vID}, is sometimes
pronounced more like {DeyvID} by English-speakers.


> Other than that, although it is always great to receive info from maltz,
> it would even better if those info contained words, which we actually need
> to use/could use in our every day klingon sentences.
>

The reason Maltz gave information on those two names is because they are
named used in the Duolingo course which had not previously appeared written
in Klingon (i.e., in any official Latin-script transliteration). {ghorqon}
had appeared in Hamlet, but that's non-canon. So people are indeed
composing sentences using those names.

-- 
De'vID
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20180703/d53595e8/attachment-0016.htm>