The existence of a real-world reason for the form of a word does not mean or prove that Maltz's guess about its origin is wrong. -------- Original message -------- From: James Landau via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol@lists.kli.org> Date: 5/29/25 5:26 PM (GMT-05:00) To: tlhingan-hol@lists.kli.org Cc: James Landau <savegraduation@yahoo.com> Subject: [tlhIngan Hol] Native Klingon speakers' misunderstandings
Hi,
I basically like your idea, but I think this is not a list of "Native Klingon speakers' misunderstandings". The words you have listed only show confusion among English speakers. ... Or maybe I jus don't get what you mean.
The confusion is definitely caused by these [fictional] Klingon speakers knowing other Klingon words, and committing "folk etymologies" of some sort. Let's look at each one:
*HuS* is not used to mean "lynch" or "execute by hanging." That's a different word: *jIb*. (Maltz thought maybe an early form of torture or execution was hanging people by their hair, but he wasn't totally sure about this and may have just been reacting to the homophony.) (Marc Okrand to Lieven L. Litaer talking about the Hamletmachine, November 2019)
Maltz guesses, from the homophony, that an early form of hanging was hanging by the hair. This is because *jIb* and *jIb* are homonyms in Klingon. But the real out-of-universe reason Okrand made *jIb* the verb for "hang" was that *jIb* is an Easter egg based on the word "gibbet". So the homophony of *jIb* (hair) and *jIb* (hang) is clearly really a coincidence in Klingon. Maltz has his own ideas, though.
*tera' qaw Ha'DIbaH* is "beef" (often shortened by leaving out *tera'*). (Maltz said he would have thought this referred to elephant meat, but...) (qepHom 2024, p. 33)
It's obvious to English speakers that *tera' qaw* is a borrowing from the English word "cow". For Maltz, whose first language is Klingon, however, he was surprised that it's not elephant meat, because *qaw* has a homonym in Klingon meaning "memory", and the elephant is the Terran animal best known for its memory.
On *Qajnav*: It is not explained whether the second part of this word is *nav* paper. (qep'a' 30)
Klingon speakers think *Qajnav* might be derived from *nav*, meaning "paper", based on the superficial resemblances of *Qajnav* and *nav* in Klingon. Out-of-universe, though, Okrand created *Qajnav* as a pun from *van jaQ* backwards = deep ends = Depends. Obviously, the pun is just coincidental as well in the Star Trek universe (although, as someone on this mailing list has commented before, the Federation must have been pretty surprised when they encountered Klingons and discovered that their language had so many "coincidences" with Federation Standard/English), but I doubt Marc Okrand really wanted *Qajnav* to be related to *nav*, considering he arrived at that form quite accidentally. But then there is *qaq naH* for watermelon, which according to the Klingonia dictionary both derives from *naH* (fruit) and makes a two-word pun on "Hancock", so maybe he did? There are plenty of analogous situations of native English speakers being confused about the etymology of words in their own language. Many English speakers, for instance, mistakenly believe that the word "bully" is derived from "bull", because a bull butts people with its horns and is generally aggressive, especially in bullfights. Then there are all the spurious acronym explanations, like "posh" = "port out, starboard home" or the belief that medieval Englishmen and Englishwomen once needed the consent of the king to fornicate. A certain ethnic slur for Koreans and Vietnamese has been widely explained as originating from American soldiers in Korea hearing Koreans saying "Miguk", meaning "American(s)", and reanalyzing the word, although there are records of Anglophones referring to Filipinos this way long before the Korea War. And so have there been at least a few notes on Maltz and other Klingons thinking this way about Klingon words.
Message: 6 Date: Tue, 27 May 2025 17:10:22 +0200 From: "Lieven L. Litaer" <levinius@gmx.de<mailto:levinius@gmx.de>> To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org<mailto:tlhingan-hol@kli.org> Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] Native Klingon speakers' misunderstandings Message-ID: <50491946-3edc-4fe8-9646-71723fa1f663@gmx.de<mailto:50491946-3edc-4fe8-9646-71723fa1f663@gmx.de>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed