[tlhIngan Hol] Bullets in Klingon

James Landau savegraduation at yahoo.com
Wed Jan 25 17:09:14 PST 2023


I've been thinking for a long time about how to translate the song "Boys like You" (SoH rurbogh loDpu') by Who Is Fancy (ft/ Meghan Trainor and Ariana Grande) into Klingon. I thought, after we got *ruH* and *tapqej*, that we'd had all the necessary words. But then I thought about the beginning line:

I'm at the deep end, cannonball jump

I wondered what Klingons would call a cannonball in the swimming pool. I wondered if the war-ready Klingon people would derive it from their word for a ballistic cannonball, the way English speakers do. So what was the word for "cannonball", I asked myself.. I figured they'd say *tal* plus whatever the word for bullet was, right? But I checked the dictionary -- no word for bullet. No word for projectile. Not even a word for ballista. Considering the Klingons are notorious for talking about battle all the time, I thought we'd just HAVE to already have a word for projectiles -- one we could put after *HIch* to make a word for "bullet" or put after *tal* to make a word for "cannonball". But I can't seem to find one.

Am I missing something? Or do people here just use a non-canon derivation like *pengHom*?
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