[tlhIngan Hol] New Words and Grammar Points from qep'a' cha'maH javDIch

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Jul 23, 2019, at 06:16, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> --- begin quote ---
> The Big Bang -- meaning the start of the universe -- is, as you
> once hypothesized, {qa'vam}, the word used by Klingons for the Genesis
> device.  {qa'vam} is perhaps best defined as "origin of everything" or
> "start of it all" or the like.  Maltz said you could say {qa'vam nger}
> "Big Bang Theory," but he thought that was weird -- the start of it
> all isn't a theory, he said -- it's just the start of it all.  If one
> thinks the start of it all was a big explosion and that's a theory,
> then {qa'vam nger} could mean "the theory of how everything began,"
> but the Klingon phrase doesn't contain the notion of explosion.  For
> the TV Show -- whether to translate it or use the English -- that's up
> to you.
> --- end quote ---

Thanks, that’s a more detailed version of that quote than I think I have seen previously. I’ve seen a quote along the lines of Maltz thinking the phrase sounded weird because “it’s not a theory”, which without further context might seem to support {nger} fitting with the colloquial usage of “theory” if one fills in the blanks with “[the big bang] isn’t a theory[; it’s accepted as a fact]”, but with the full quote it seems more like this was a commentary on {qa'vam} than it was on {nger}; i.e., {qa'vam} refers to the origin of everything regardless of the specifics of how it happened, while the Big Bang Theory is a theory (in the scientific sense of the word) regarding those specifics.