[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon food vocabulary

[James Landau]

 >From: "De'vID" <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] Klingon food vocabulary>>On Mon, 22 Nov 2021 at 07:31, James Landau <savegraduation at yahoo.com> wrote:

>majQa'!

qatlho'!

>The Arabic word for bulgur is pronounced like {borghel}. It is a food item,
>and it's sometimes fed to birds, but has nothing really to do with their
>eggs. There are a number of dishes cooked with both bulgur and quail eggs,
>but that's a rather weak connection. Maybe Okrand just thought they looked
>like tiny bird eggs.


That's interesting -- quite a likely connection, it seems!

I had a thought: *borgh* is probably how the Star Trek word "borg" would be rendered in Klingon (hurray for the ability to end words in the cluster -rgh!) *el* sounds like the Semitic root for god/God. Borg god, referring to the Borg Queen? (Just from what I've heard bits and pieces of elsewhere, as I've never watched the show).

So what's the relevance of that? Well, on a conworlding and conlanging forum I frequent, we were discussing silicon-based life not long ago, and someone referenced a Star Trek episode that involved a planet with silicon-based life. I don't remember the name of the planet, but every few decades/centuries? every live silicon-based organism dies except one, who takes care of the eggs that will be hatched. The eggs look something like metal balls, and the guardian of the eggs looks like a rusty red rock. The Starship Enterprise explorers start cracking and killing the eggs until one of them telepathically locks with the egg-guardian, who explains that she is alive and these are the eggs they're killing. So maybe a bird with edible eggs had the name *borghel* chosen because there's something egg-related about the borgs, or specifically their queen (Borg-el)?


I see that Lieven has been working on the wiki page. Good. The food vocabulary page could always use some more eyes.

However, I noticed that many of the non-borrowing fruit words (cherry, grapefruit, pomegranate, etc.) are now missing from the page. What happened to them?


>There are some famous people named Borgel, including a Swiss watchmaker and
>a family of Tunisian rabbis, but again, nothing to do with birds or eggs
>that I could find.


Just about any combination of sounds can be a surname for some person on this planet or another, so I agree with you that the surname Borgel is unlikely to have to do with the bird called a borghel.
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