[tlhIngan Hol] wishlist for TKD 3ed

[De'vID]

On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 7:45 PM Lieven L. Litaer via tlhIngan-Hol <
tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org> wrote:

> So if you want to stay in the game: Worf does not speak good Klingon, or
> has an unknown strange dialect, or has a terrible English accent.
>

That seems to be confusing Worf (the character) with Michael Dorn (the
actor).

In-universe, Worf speaks Klingon in a way that other characters react to
him as if he were a fluent Klingon speaker. There was a period during which
he was considered an outcast, and none of the Klingons who mocked him
commented on his inability to speak the language or having a Terran accent.
Other presumably fluent Klingon characters, like Gowron or Martok, have
also spoken "bad" (from a real-world point of view) Klingon, but we also
accept that they're actually speaking "good" Klingon in-universe, and that
our inability to understand them is due to regional variation or dialect.

It's like those American movies where an American English-speaking actor is
playing a German (or French or Russian or whatever) character, and
throughout most of the movie, they're speaking English with a "German"
accent. But for some pivotal scene, when they need to keep our hero (or the
audience) in the dark, the character switches to speaking German. The actor
may speak German very badly, but the audience is supposed to understand
that the character is, in fact, speaking fluent German.

Outside of the Klingonist community, most Star Trek fans assume that
Michael Dorn is speaking "proper" Klingon in character as Worf. When people
find out I know Klingon, they often say things like, "So you must
understand everything that Worf says, right?" Like I said, whatever you may
feel about Dorn's attitude or ability when it comes to Klingon, most Star
Trek fans associate Worf with the language.

-- 
De'vID
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20230501/acbebde6/attachment-0002.htm>