On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 at 18:01, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
On 9/20/2019 11:50 AM, Lieven L. Litaer wrote:
(By the way, it's very likely that Star Trek authors picked {qIv} "knee"
and made it longer by one syllable.)

Then why didn't they just say knee? I think the Star Trek writers were playing the same game that Okrand does: inventing a Klingon organ and not telling us what it is.


It's explicitly stated in The Star Trek Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., p. 393, that this was the word for knee. Out-of-universe, the writers or director probably didn't like the way {qIv} sounded and added an extra syllable. In-universe, perhaps this is a dialectical word in Kor's dialect (he doesn't seem to quite speak what we know as standard Klingon), or perhaps there is some technical difference between {qIv} and *{qIvon}.

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De'vID