[tlhIngan Hol] pseudo-Klingon words from the paq'batlh

Will Martin willmartin2 at mac.com
Wed Jul 3 03:56:01 PDT 2019


That brings up the point that proper names don’t usually show up in dictionaries. In Klingon, there are exceptions for names of people in the Star Trek Universe, primarily to help us with spelling. We don’t have Klingon spelling for Trump, Obama, Han Solo, or Harry Potter. We don’t have Klingon spellings for Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, the Tao, or Jesus. 

If a word not in the dictionary shows up in a spot in a Klingon sentence where it makes sense for a name to go, then we deal with it in Klingon much like we deal with it in English. We spell it the best we can, and if it’s a new name for the reader, we introduce it with whatever spelling we have for it. 

I had a Vietnamese friend named Kungwai. I’m sure that’s not how it is spelled in Vietnamese, since I’m pretty sure that the language doesn’t use Roman characters, and likely there are multiple spellings of it in English by different people with the same name. He initially introduced himself as Johnny because he assumed we would not be comfortable trying to say his real name. 

wIl martIn ‘oH tera’ngan pongwIj’e’, ‘ach thIngan vIjatlhDI’ ru’ charghwI’ vImaS. 

If you are concerned that people will be confused because you are using names in Klingon the way people use them in any other language, and you want to prevent confusion by those who will try to look up the names in the dictionary, you can be polite and mark the names with asterisks, not that anyone would expect you to do that in any “real” language...

Sent from my iPad

> On Jul 3, 2019, at 4:39 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> De'vID:
> > There's only one "orthodox religion" here: 
> > that of Kahless the Unforgettable. (Curse
> > the heretics who call him by a slightly 
> > different variant of his name!)
> 
> hahaha ! bIlugh !
> 
> ~ hkkhkh
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