On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 11:45 AM Lieven L. Litaer <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
Am 23.09.2020 um 17:23 schrieb Steven Boozer:
Klingon Word of the Day for Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Klingon word: boqrat Part of speech: noun Definition: *bokrat*, type of animal
I have always wondered if that is a proper name, or if this is a kind of rat: a "bok-rat".
Of course, having a Klingon word {boqrat} eliminates the idea of it being a "rat"like animal, but that Klingon spelling appeared after the script was written.
Maybe it is a rat-like animal. "Rat" is a simple syllable, and Klingon does have plenty of other strange coincidences with English. We even have a few of those coincidences on Earth: Mbabaram is famous in linguistic circles for a striking coincidence in its
vocabulary. When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation, *dog*. Dixon suspected that Bennett hadn't understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" was in fact *dog*, pronounced almost identically to the English word (compare true cognates such as Yidiny *gudaga*, Dyirbal *guda*, Djabugay *gurraa* and Guugu Yimidhirr *gudaa*, for example). The similarity is a complete coincidence: there is no discernible relationship between English and Mbabaram. This and other false cognates are often cited as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of lexical comparisons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language The vowel in Klingon *rat* is /ɑ/, while the vowel in English "rat" is /æ/, which is often transliterated as *e* instead (see *'epIl* "apple"), so perhaps the perceived coincidence is just an artifact of the standard Klingon orthography.